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ABSTRACT
Improvement of degraded agricultural soil has resulted in increased interest in the utilization of fertilizers to supply energy and nutrient for agricultural crops and microorganism. This experiment was conducted at Greenhills farm Ologbo, Ikpoba-Okha Local Government Area of Edo State, Nigeria, to study the effect of fertilizer application on bacteria and anaerobes composition in the rhizosphere of cassava plant cultivated on ultisols. The experiment was carried out using three treatments which were obtained at different field in the farm with varying fertilizer (NPK 12:12:17) treatments. The treatments were double dose of fertilizer (FD), single dose of fertilizer (FAC), and control. Chemical analysis was carried out to determine the actions of the fertilizer on the soil chemical properties / microbial properties. Results from single dose of fertilizer (FAC) showed decrease in the soil pH (5.48), increase in EC (310.00), decrease in organic carbon and organic matter and decrease in the primary NPK (0.92, 16.44 and 0.13) respectively and results from double dose of fertilizer (FD) showed decrease in the soil pH (5.15), increase in EC (589.00), decrease in organic carbon and organic matter respectively are significant (p ≤ 0.05) lower when compared to the control. The application of fertilizer lead to the increase in the bacteria population in the soil, FD has the highest bacterial count of 5.78 log10cfu/g compared to FAC (5.67 log10cfu/g) and control (5.68 log10cfu/g) which are quite low but has no significant effect on the anaerobes in the soil.
A
