The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) defines conservation tillage as a tillage system that leaves enough crop residue to adequately protect the soil from erosion throughout the year. The percent of cover required varies by field according to soil type, slope, crop rotation, winter cover crops used and other factors (NRCS website). Conservation tillage in general and notill practice...

dryland winter wheat (triticum sativum l.) generally grown in rotation with fallow or chickpea (cicer arietinum l.) constitutes a major crop in the west region of iran. information is limited on the success of more intensive dryland cropping systems while applying conservation tillage management. an experiment was conducted to determine the effect of five tillage systems on soil physical proper...

Soil microorganisms are important for climate regulation as well as for plant nutrition. In agricultural soils the microorganisms are affected by management choices, like which type of tillage that is used. Moldboard plowing, the most common tillage practice, increases mineralization which leads to soil organic carbon (SOC) loss, and may thus reduce soil quality. Conservation tillage practices ...

Water conservation is a priority in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and other major Texas cities that routinely face water shortages and drought. Soil management is fundamental to water conservation efforts. Incorporation of composted biosolids (CB) in low quality soils can enhance water conservation and provide organic carbon and nutrients that improve growth of vegetation and limit sediment loss...

Soil erosion from agricultural lands can be reduced by adoption of conservation management practices. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effectiveness and cost-benefit of conservation management practices on sediment reduction under a corn–soybean rotation. The experimental site was 6.4 ha (15.8 ac) and located within the Four Mile Creek watershed in eastern Iowa. Management p...

Land degradation is one of the severe environmental problems in China. In order to combat land degradation, a soil conservation program was introduced since 2000 to reduce soil erosion by converting slope-cultivated land into forestry and pasture. This paper represents the first systematic attempt to investigate the impact of the soil conservation program on land degradation in the loess platea...

Land use intensity is an important indicator of human activities, so we quantified the land use intensity and five ecosystem services (soil conservation, water conservation, carbon storage, net primary productivity (NPP), and crop production) in 13 subbasins of the Tabu River Basin in an agro-pastoral ecotone in central Inner Mongolia. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationships among ecosystem ...

This paper develops a soil conservation model that is relevant to smallholder farmers who applylittle or no fertilizer. Empirical results drawn from northern Tanzania imply that, ignoringfertility mining problem in model specification leads to overestimation of profits for farms thatapply little or no fertilizer. The model also shows that, the impact of output price on soilc...

Investigating microbial metabolic characteristics and soil organic carbon (SOC) within aggregates and their relationships under conservation tillage may be useful in revealing the mechanism of SOC sequestration in conservation tillage systems. However, limited studies have been conducted to investigate the relationship between SOC and microbial metabolic characteristics within aggregate fractio...