Effects of early compost application on no-till organic soybean

Abstract

Weed control has always been an important issue in agriculture. With the advent of no-till systems, soil erosion was reduced but herbicide use was increased. Organic no-till systems try to adjust reduced erosion to the no use of herbicides. Nevertheless, this adjustment is limited by the cost of mechanical weed control. This cost may be reduced by improved cultural weed control with cover crops mulches. In this paper we report a study on the application of compost manure on an oats winter cover crop, preceding soybean, instead of on the soybean summer crop. Treatments comprised a control without compost manure, and compost manure doses of 4 and 8 Mg ha-1 applied either on oats in winter or soybean in summer, organized in a randomized block design, with five replications. In summer, plots were split into weed-controlled or not controlled subplots. The timing of application and the manure doses did not affect the oats biomass or the soybean performance. However, in summer, without water stress, the application of manure at 8 Mg ha-1 directly on soybean has reduced weed biomass in this crop.

Using mulch from cover crops to facilitate organic no-till soybean and maize production. A review

“…Organic MNT is also used in South America (Altieri et al 2011), where MNT is widely applied in conventional farming (Derpsch 1998). Researchers have reported on studies related to fertilization strategies, cover crop species performance, and innovative solutions to suppress weeds using electrical current in MNT systems (Penha et al 2012;Favarato et al 2014;Landers et al 2016).…”