Over the past decade, organic fertilizers have been increasingly integrated into turfgrass management strategies in the United States. Organic treatments provide numerous benefits to soil and eco-system sustainability, and are therefore preferable to their conventional counterparts. Recent research has shown that dissolved organic matter (DOM) from organic fertilizers may actually enhance the mobility of organic pesticides through the soil solum, thereby increasing the potential risk of groundwater contamination. Quantitative understanding of the fate and behavior of pesticides in turfgrass systems is imperative in assessing their long and short term efficiency and impact. In this study, structural characterization was performed on DOM extracted from two commercial organic fertilizers by NMR, ATR and elemental analysis . We used a batch equilibrium technique to evaluate the effects of the DOM from each fertilizer on the sorption of 14C labeled phenanthrene by a sandy loam soil. Sorption experiments showed that the sorption capacity of the soil decreased as the concentration of DOM in solution was increased.
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