Lactobacillus plantarum improves the efficiency of sheep manure composting and the quality of the final product

Traditional composting was made the composts longer maturation period, bad sensorial and instability quality. The microbial compost promoter will accelerate composting can not only accelerate the degradation of organic matter, shorten the composting period and accelerate the composting process, but also can improve the sensorial and quality. Physical indexes, biochemical indexes and microbiota of cow manure compost with Lactobacillus plantarum (L. plantarum) compost promoter and traditional way simultaneously sampled at three time points from 8 weeks and then compared. L. plantarum adding resulted in a lower pH and induced the higher level of germination index (GI), total Potassium content and sensory evaluation score, suggesting greater economic benefits in composting. L. plantarum adding shown the different composting microbiota structural and functional characteristics as revealed by metagenome sequencing were highly distinct with the control group. Although L. plantarum only exists in the compost process for the first 3 weeks, they might be composts quality-promoting attribute and may contribute to improve the abundance of the microbiota which could improve total phosphorus content and total potassium content of compost during composting, and these changes may accelerate compost maturation in turn. Thus, “composting microbiota maturation index” was proposed to quantitatively compare impact of compost promoter on composting micro-ecology. Consistently, the maturation of composting microbiota was accelerated by L. plantarum adding. Our results suggest the L. plantarum compost promoter can improve cow manure compost quality and sensorial and also accelerate maturation, it reveal a tremendous potential of L. plantarum compost promoter in compost plant.