Economic assessment of sugarcane pulp as amelioration of soil hydro-physical characteristics, water productivity, and wheat yield

Sugarcane pulp as organic material offers many advantages compared to other crop residues. Application of organic materials is targeted to improve soil hydro-physical characteristics, saved-water, and increase crop productivity. However, the use of sugarcane pulp to achieve these targets and its economical assessment has not been tested so far. Therefore, a field experiment was conducted in the two successive wheat-growing seasons 2015 and 2016 in a completely randomized design with four treatments and three replications. The sugarcane pulp treatments were 2, 4, and 6 t ha-1, plus to the control (0 t ha-1).The soil hydro-physical characteristics were determined, i.e., bulk density, total porosity, moisture content at both field capacity and wilting point, available water content, drainable pores, holding pores, capillary pores, saturated hydraulic conductivity, aggregate mean weight diameter and water-stable aggregates. Also, water requirements, saved-water (WS), water productivity (WP), and grain yield (GY), as well as, benefit-cost ratio (BCR) were calculated. Both treatments 6 and 4 t ha-1 improved soil hydro-physical characteristics, and increased GY, WS, and WP to highest values; and there were no significant differences between them for several characteristics. However, both treatments 2 and 4 t ha-1 achieved highest and comparable BCR (0.97 and 0.95, respectively), whereas the treatment 6 t ha-1 achieved lowest BCR (0.85).Therefore, economically, the use of2 t ha-1 is preferred and recommended.