الفهرس 
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Abstract
1.INTRODUCTION
Wheat is an important strategic crop in Egypt (Elmetwalli et al., 2022). Its annual consumption is increasing continuously due to the concurrent increases in population (Ouda and Zohry, 2017). To lessen the gap between production and consumption, Egypt has become the largest wheat importer worldwide (Abdelmageed et al., 2019). In parallel, the Egyptian government espoused wheat intensification strategies e.g. increase wheat productivity per unit area as well as expanding the cultivated areas (Ouda and Zohry, 2017; Mosa et al., 2020; Elzemrany and Faiyad, 2021). Because of such intensification plans, the use of chemicals was exaggerated and soil degradation turns out to be a global problem (Babla et al., 2022). Probably recycling organic residues may lessen soil degradation (Bationo et al., 2007; El-Ramady et al., 2022) via substituting (partially or totally) chemical fertilizers (Wang et al., 2018; Sarhan and Bashandy, 2021) and, at the same time, increasing the organic carbon and nitrogen contents in soils (Maris et al., 2021).
Different forms of organic amendments can be used to attain this aim after being processed via composting (Barthod et al., 2018; Farid et al., 2021c; Awwad et al., 2022) or pyrolysis forming a product named biochar (Mohamed et al., 2018; Bassouny and Abbas, 2019; Abdelhafez et al., 2021; Lalarukh et al., 2022). In a study made by Simiele et al. (2022), compost seemed to have a superior effect on plant growth than biochar. Accordingly, the use of compost as a soil conditioner would be a matter of concern in the current study.
Composting is the conversation of farm wastes into valuable products (Barthod et al., 2018) with the aid of microorganisms (Ayilara et al., 2020) to improve the agro-ecosystem health (El-Akhdar et al., 2018). Compost has a sustainable value (Dahlin et al., 2019) as an efficient low cost additive (Song and Lee, 2010) that is used to restore soil fertility (Sanasam and Talukdar, 2017;Acharya et al., 2019) and enhance plant growth (Babla et al., 2022). Probably, the effect of mature compost on increasing the productivity of crop yields is equivalent to or superior to the effect of chemical fertilizers (Morra et al., 2021).
Compost is produced from plant (Farid et al., 2018) or animal resides (Ravindran et al., 2019). The lignin content of plant residues is high enough, especially in the fresh remains (Almagro et al., 2021) to lessen considerably its degradation rate in soil (Kamimura et al., 2019); hence, guarantee long-term sustainment and improvements for soil physical characteristics. On the other hand, animal residues are easily biodegradable (Muchanga et al., 2019) and could enrich soils with nutrients (Brust, 2019). It is thought that plant growth is a resultant component of improvements in soil physical and chemical characteristics.
Thus, the current study aimed at comparing the effects of composts prepared from animal (more easily decomposable product) versus plant (less degradable one) residues to restore soil fertility and enhance the growth and productivity of wheat plants. Rice straw was selected for preparation of plant residues compost (PRC) because of its high content of lignin (Vu et al., 2017) and cellulose substances (Abaide et al., 2019; Freitas et al., 2022). To increase its content of N, soy bean residues is guaranteed (Sun et al., 2021) to be mixed with the rice straw residues.
In the current study, two rates of compost (prepared from either plant or animal residues) i.e.15 and 25 Mg / 〖ha〗^(-1) were applied to a clayey soil which was planted with wheat under field conditions and this investigation lasted until wheat harvest stage. This soil received the recommended doses of NPK fertilizers in order to compare between the two types of composts (plant-based versus anim