Effect of Soil Amendments Application on Juice Quality and Sugar Yields of Sugar Beet Grown under Saline Soil Conditions

Abstract

Soil salinity adversely affects quality parameters of sugar beet juice leading to a reduction in recoverable sugar yield. Improving the physical and chemical properties of salt affected soils is essential for sustainable cultivation and production of sugar beet in Egypt. A field experiment was carried out at the Delta Sugar Company to evaluate soil amendments, i.e., Phosphogypsium (PG), Desaline, humic acid and treated filter cake and molasses application on roots quality and sugar yield of sugar beet. Application of molasses at a rate of 50 L/fed. significantly increased sugar content (Pol%) only in the first growing season, while soil amendments do not have any significant in sugar content increment and the highest sugar content was produced from plants in the control treatment. Application of soil amendments in particular 1 ton/fed. of treated filter cake significantly reduced Na%, K% and α-amino-N in root juice in both growing seasons. Soil amendments application significantly increased sugar beet juice quality, theoretical sugar yield (TSY) and recoverable sugar yield (RSY) in both growing seasons. The highest value of quality index was produced from the application of 1 ton/fed. of treated filter cake. The application of either treated filter cake or 50 L/fed. of molasses significantly enhances both theoretical and recoverable sugar yields. The effect of soil amendments and molasses application on sugar loss yield was barely significant, and varietal and environmental dependent. 134 Mohsen A. Gameh, et. al. (2020), Egyptian Sugar Journal, ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ