This field study was done to study the effects of pesticides chlorpyrifos and dimethoate singly and in combination with soil amendments like chemical fertilizer (CF), farmyard manure (FM), and 50% CF + 50% FM (CM) on various indices of growth, physio-biochemical parameters of brinjal, and their residual effect in tomato seedlings. As compared to the control, the decrease of 9.5 and 5.5%, 8.9 and 5.0% in fresh weight, dry weight respectively was recorded in the pesticide-only treatment in the brinjal crop. Pesticides when applied in combination with soil amendments depicted the highest growth of 105.4 and 118.2%, 104.1 and 115.1% in pesticides + CF treatment, 72.7 and 85.1%, 68.1 and 78.1% in pesticides + CM treatment, and 64.4 and 74.0%, 62.7 and 65.7% in pesticides + FM treatment compared to control. In tomato seedlings, the pesticides + CF treatment exhibited the lowest growth indices (25.5 and 31.9%, 26.4 and 28.8%) across the combined treatments while pesticide-only treatment depicted minimum growth compared to the control. In the case of photosynthesis rate and antioxidant activity, the combined treatments showed the trend as pesticides + CF > pesticides + CM > pesticides + FM in the brinjal crop; however, the trend became somewhat reversed in the tomato crop. The results indicated that soil-amended practices modulated pesticide-induced damage by upregulating photosynthetic performance, chlorophyll a fluorescence, and antioxidant balancing which might be associated with the mitigation of ROS-induced pesticide toxicity, and the effect was more pronounced with CM. Furthermore, our study was supported by non-metric-multidimensional scaling (NMDS)-constructed ordination plots by showing spatial patterns in different variables. The study might help in taking management decision to design mitigation actions for government and non-government agency at the farmers' level.
Keywords: Antioxidant enzymes; PS II photochemistry; Pesticides; Reactive oxygen species; Soil amendments.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.