Volume 6, Spring 2008 - Saddleback College

Fall 2007 Biology 3A Abstracts
We found in our study that there is a significant
difference between chemical and organic fertilizer.
For taller, greener plants with more tomatoes in a
shorter period of time, our experiment would
suggest that chemical fertilizer indeed works best.
Companies put nitrogen in the chemical fertilizer
to allow for better growth. According to J. Heeb,
high amounts of nitrogen result in faster plant growth
(Heeb et al., 2005). Organic plants do not have
this efficient production of nitrogen, they rely on
microorganisms to break down and release
nutrients so the process is much slower (Chu et al.,
2006). Over a month’s time, we did not have any
actual full tomato growth, so we cannot say
whether or not the tomatoes would be better
tasting or larger in size, but the aspects of the
chemically fed tomato plants help to indicate that
the tomatoes might be larger in size. The
chemically fed plants grew much larger in a short
amount of time than the organically fed plants,
they also, through the use of a chlorophyll
concentration test, produced much greener leaves
which helps to show how they would indeed be
creating more sugars through photosynthesis thus
possibly yielding more fruit. It has been tested in
other studies that the more nitrogen produced
during the growth of a plant the more it grows and
chemical fertilizers add nitrogen to the soil the
plant is growing in (Wang et al., 2001). In conclusion,
we found, along with many other studies, that for larger
more productive tomato plants, chemical fertilizer
works the best compared to organic fertilizer.
Literature Cited
Chu, H., Fujii, T., Morimoto, S., Lin, X., Hu, J., and
Zhang, J. 2006. Community Struction of Ammonia-
Oxidizing Bacteria under Long-Term Application of
Mineral Fertilizer and Organic Manure in a Sandy
Loam Soil. Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
73: 485-491
Heeb, A., Lundegardh, B., Errcsson, T., and Savage, P.
2007. Nitrogen form affects yield and taste of
tomatoes. Journal of the Science of Food and
Agriculture. 85: 1405-1414
Wang, Y., Garvin, D., and Kochian, L. 2001. Nitrate-
Inducted Genes in Tomato Roots. Array Analysis
Reveals Novel Genes That May Play a Role in
Nitrogen Nutrition. Plant Physiol. 127: 345-359
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Saddleback Journal of Biology
Spring 2008