Organic fertilizer is made from natural organic matters through decomposition and fermentation carried out by microbes. The characteristics of organic fertilizer are: wide material source, large quantity, complete nutrients but low yield, late but long fertilizer effects. They can only be absorbed by the plants after being broken down by the microbes they contain. The common type is farmhouse fertilizers.
Ecological fertilizers are actually similar to organic fertilizers. They are made from organic wastes from industrial and agriculture productions, domestic wastes through decomposition and activation to be transformed into effective nutrients that can be absorbed by the plants. Organic fertilizer and eco-fertilizer are the same in nature but called by different names.
The difference between these two and bio-organic fertilizers are: First, the former two mainly conduct natural decomposition with the help of microbes (beneficial and harmful microbes coexist) available in the material. While bio-organic fertilizer are mainly added with artificially selected and cultured beneficial microbes to conduct more thorough fermentation. Second, the nutrition, especially nitrogen, has very high loss rate in the former two types. The fertilizer effects are low and not completely safe (may contain harmful pests eggs or plant pathogenic bacteria, too much may ‘burn’ the seedlings). Bio-organic fertilizers, as they have been though high-temperature decomposition of the microbes, have lower nutrition loss, higher fertilizer effects, and much safer as the pests eggs and pathogenic bacteria have been killed.
The biggest difference between microbial fertilizer and the former three is: microbial fertilizer is a compound of different functional microbe strains. The organic matters it contains is mainly for microbe consumption, but not specifically to supply nutrition for the plants. It mainly rely on the microbe metabolize activities to indirectly supply nutrients for the plants. Furthermore, microbial fertilizer only uses pure natural vegetal ingredients and does not contain any animal wastes. |
