Student Research Reports

View Research Report

We are located in the South-East of France, in Avignon, which is a very dry area. Therefore we are interested in studying the possibilities to save water in agriculture. In addition, we noticed that not many people use compost, despite the fact that it is an interesting way to recycle organic matter, so we decided to work on compost. Our goal was to see if compost could help save water by retaining moisture. We also wanted to verify that soil with compost could allow plants to grow faster compared to just soil.The aim of our project is both to investigate the impact of compost on saving water, to encourage people to switch to composting and to create awareness of how beneficial compost is. In Experiment 1, we found that radishes were growing faster in the “Soil+compost” condition than in the “Only soil” condition. In addition, we studied the evolution of humidity levels. In both conditions the humidity was set at the same level at the beginning of the experiment, and we measured it for 12 days, without adding any water. We found that moisture was much more preserved in the “Soil+compost” condition than in the “Only soil” condition. The results were confirmed in Experiment 2, using a different protocol where we studied how much water was used depending on the condition, using a ceramic plant waterer and bottle with water. We found that the condition with the compost used 57% less water than the condition without the compost and allowed the radishes to grow more than in the condition without compost.