Beet Processing Lime for Use as a Soil Amendment.

In the Red River Valley North Dakota, about 425,000 tons of lime is used to help refine about 39,000 Mg of sugarbeets at six processing plants.  This lime is used to help remove impurities from the sugar slurry and is not reused.  Finding suitable land application sites for this spent lime can be challenging due to fact that many of the soils in the area have pH values that exceed 7.  Low pH soils do exist in North Dakota and addition of this processing lime to them could greatly benefit producers and the sugarbeet processing industry.  The objective of this research is to determine the effectiveness of sugarbeet processing lime at reducing exchangeable Al in acid soils located in southwest North Dakota.  In the greenhouse, pots containing 1 kg of low pH soil (<5.0) having an exchangeable Al concentration of 25 mg/kg were treated with spent lime, commercial lime, or laboratory grade lime at rates of 0, 0.5X, 1X, and 2X of the recommended rate (4 Mg ECC/ha).  Treatments were either incorporated or surface applied. Soils were allowed to incubate for 8 weeks, which was followed by seeding of wheat.  The information provided by this research will indicate the potential usefulness of spent lime at neutralizing low pH soils in North Dakota.