Effect of Lignocellulolytic Fungi to Biodegradation of Different Type of Organic Waste Derived from Cocoa Production

Abstract

Cocoa production provides considerable amounts of organic wastes, for instance cocoa pod husks and pruning wastes that potentially support the long-term cocoa sustainability due to their strong connection with soil fertility improvement. Unfortunately, organic wastes degradation in the cocoa farms usually takes a bit longer time as related to the dominant of recalcitrant materials such as lignin. This study aims to evaluate the ability of lignocellulolytic fungi isolated from cocoa farms to degrade different types of organic wastes. A two way completely randomized design was implemented with six different treatment of fungi inoculants, i.e. control (Ctrl), commercial decomposer (EM4), fungi isolate 1 (Tr), fungi isolate 2 (As), fungi isolate 3 (Rt), and fungi isolate consortium (Cons), and three different types of organic residues, i.e. cocoa pruning wastes (CPr), cocoa pod husks (CPH), and the combination of pruning waste and cocoa pod husk (CPrPH), used as factor experiments. The parameters including degradation rate of organic residues, organic C and total N were observed following 60 days decomposition at room temperature. The analysis of variance was used to see any significant difference of treatment effect to parameters. Results suggest that the consortium fungi inoculants application in combination with mixture of cocoa pod husks and pruning residues (CPrPH+Cons) demonstrate the significant increase in the total N, and with corresponding to the decrease in the organic C content of the composted materials in compare to different treatments. The cocoa pod husk weight loss shows a higher value of 86%, followed by B3 of 52%, and B1 treatments with 38% from the initial condition, resulting from both single and consortium fungi inoculant applications. Our results suggest the potential effect of consortium fungi inoculants to improve the quality of composted materials and degradation rate of organic matter after 60 observation days.