Crop performance and soil fertility improvement using organic fertilizer produced from valorization of Carica papaya fruit peel

In recent times, research attention is focusing on harnessing agricultural wastes for the production of value-added products. In this study, the valorization of Carica papaya (Pawpaw) fruit peels was evaluated for the production of quality organic fertilizer via anaerobic digestion (AD) while the effects of the fertilizer on maize crop were also assessed. Pawpaw peel was first pretreated by thermo-alkaline methods before AD and analyses were carried out using standard methods. The resulting digestate was rich in nutrients and was dewatered to form solid organic fertilizer rich in microbes and soil nutrients. When applied to maize plants, organic fertilizer showed a better effect on plant traits than NPK 15–15–15 fertilizer and without fertilizer application. These were more pronounced at mid to high organic fertilizer applications (30-to-60-kg nitrogen/hectare (kg N/ha)) rate. Comparison between the values obtained from the field experiments reveals that the organic fertilizer showed better performance in all parameters such as the number of leaves, leaf area, plant height, stem girth, total shoot, and root biomass, and length of the root. However, the chemical fertilizer outperformed all the organic fertilizer applied rates in the average highest size of the corn ear by 1.4%. After harvesting, nutrient elements were found to have bioaccumulated in plant organs (leaves, stem, and root) with the highest values being 29.7 mg/L for nitrogen in the leaf and this value was reported from the experiment with 50 kg N/ha. For phosphorus and potassium, the highest concentrations of 7.05 and 8.4 mg/L were recorded in the plant’ stem of the experiment with 50 kg N/ha. All the treated soils recorded an increase in values of all nutrient elements over the control with the highest values recorded in the experiment with 60 kg N/ha. In soil with 60 kg N/ha, the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium increased by 28, 40, and 22% respectively over the chemical fertilizer applied experiment while different levels of increases were also recorded for all other macro and microelements in all the experiments. Thus, agricultural practices by using anaerobic digestates as organic fertilizers is a sustainable method to overcome the dependence on inorganic fertilizers high rate.