paddy rice residue covers more than 60000 ha of the khuzestan plain. high soil moisture content (low evaporation and heavy soil texture), time limitations, and the likelihood of rainfall make conventional tillage methods unsuitable for wheat cultivation after the rice harvest. the present study investigated the best residue management method, and fuel and time savings, to produce acceptable yie...

A major challenge for agriculture is to enhance productivity with minimum impact on the environment. Several studies indicate that cover crops could replace anthropogenic inputs and enhance crop productivity. However, so far, it is unclear if cover crop effects vary between different cropping systems, and direct comparisons among major arable production systems are rare. Here we compared the sh...

Agriculture is facing a major challenge nowadays: to increase crop production for food and energy while preserving ecosystem functioning and soil quality. Argentine Pampas is one of the main world producers of crops and one of the main adopters of conservation agriculture. Changes in soil chemical and physical properties of Pampas soils due to different tillage systems have been deeply studied....

efficient energy use in agriculture sector is one of the prerequisites to sustainable agriculture, because it allows financial savings, fossil resources preservation along with decreasing trend of air pollution. this research was conducted at the agricultural research field of zanjan university to determine the level of input energy in different tillage systems in forage maize production when i...

Cropping sequence diversification provides a systems approach to reduce yield variations and improve resilience to multiple environmental stresses. Yield advantages of more diverse crop rotations and their synergistic effects with reduced tillage are well documented, but few studies have quantified the impact of these management practices on yields and their stability when soil moisture is limi...

Tillage practices and weather affect the release of greenhouse gases but there have been few integrated studies of the quantities released or the mechanisms involved. No-tillage may increase emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) and the ®xation of carbon by decreasing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Tillage may also decrease the oxidation rate of atmospheric methane (CH4) in aerobic soil. These effe...

Reducing tillage and growing cover crops, widely recommended practices for boosting soil health, have major impacts on soil communities. Surprisingly little is known about their impacts on soil microbial functional diversity, and especially so in irrigated Mediterranean ecosystems. In long-term experimental plots at the West Side Research and Extension Center in California's Central Valley, we ...