Original Articles: 2018 Vol: 10 Issue: 3
Estimation of Antioxidant and Phenolic Content of Organically and Conventionally Grown Tomato Cultivar (Solan Lalima) Under Mid-Hill Conditions of Himachal Pradesh
Abstract
Indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides could cause adverse changes in biological balance as well as lead to an increase in incidence of cancer and other diseases, through the toxic residues present in the grains and other edible parts of plants. The need of the hour is to make tomato farming sustainable and profitable by gradually shifting from green to evergreen farming. Supporting a serious suitable option for small scale production system, organic agriculture holds another kind of promise in terms of overall productivity with ecological parameters. Keeping in view the above criteria, the present studies were carried out in the farmer’s field (village Basal), 5 km away from Solan town, under mid hill conditions of Himachal Pradesh during the consecutive years (2013-2014), to study the effect of various organic and inorganic treatments on different antioxidant and phenolic content of tomato (cv. Solan Lalima), at the final harvesting stage. The results through HPLC confirmed that the combination of treatments were superior to the individual application of organic amendments as higher levels of phenolics (42.1%) and antioxidant activity (12.6%) was obtained as compared to the control (conventional system) (13.82% and 9.8%) respectively. The data pertaining to estimation of antioxidant properties was analyzed by significance tests tested by analysis of variance (ANOVA) (p =0.05) with SPSS STAT 20 Software for Randomized Block Design (RBD). Though nursery parameters were also evaluated, but in this research article only antioxidant and phenolic activities of conventionally and organically grown tomatoes have been evaluated. It can be concluded from the present studies that by adopting appropriate combination of organic production technologies, nutritional values can be increased with better quality produce, improved soil health and nutrient status.