Soil Conservation Tillage Effects on Yield and Water Use Efficiency on Irrigated Crops in Central Italy

Abstract

Despite possible agronomic and environmental benefits, the diffusion of soil conservation tillage systems in Italy is currently rather low. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of different soil tillage techniques, in an effort to identify suitable soil management options for irrigated crops in Central Italy. An experiment was carried out on maize and soybean from April to October in two consecutive years (1993 and 1994) in Maccarese (a coastal location near Rome). The systems compared were: conventional mouldboard ploughing (CT), minimum tillage, ridge tillage and no‐tillage (NT). In 1993, actual crop evapotranspiration was measured throughout the growing season on NT and CT soybean, using a micrometeorological technique. No significant differences due to soil tillage were found for grain yield and yield irrigation water use efficiency (IWUEy), except for soybean in 1994, in which yields and IWUEy were 59 % higher on conservation tillage treatments compared with CT. In 1994 soybean yield water use efficiency was 10.1 and 9.5 kg ha−1 mm−1 for NT and CT respectively. The results suggest that the adoption of soil conservation tillage is feasible, for the specific cropping system, with equivalent or better performances as conventional tillage.

Soybean yield gaps and water productivity in the western U.S. Corn Belt

“…(1) based on field-specific WS and, then, subtracting the producer yield reported for the same field. Finally, to evaluate the robustness of the soybean WP boundary function derived in the present study, we collected data on seed yield and seasonal crop evapotranspiration reported in the peer-review literature for 116 soybean crops grown in low-precipitation environments in the western U.S. Corn Belt and compared them against the WP boundary function (Elmore et al, 1988;Specht et al, 1989;Payero et al, 2005;Suyker and Verma, 2009;Aiken et al, 2011), Argentina (Dardanelli et al, 1991;Della Maggiora et al, 2000), and Italy (Casa and Lo Cascio, 2008). Crops reported in these previous studies were grown under nearoptimal management and varied in reliance on initial water storage, in-season precipitation, and supplemental irrigation.…”

Consequences on macroporosity and bacterial diversity of adopting a no-tillage farming system in a clayish soil of Central Italy

“…Nevertheless, the long-term effects of different tillage management systems have not been studied enough under Mediterranean conditions (Pagliai and De Nobili, 1993;De Vita et al, 2007;Casa and Lo Cascio, 2008;De Sanctis et al, 2012) and in particular the long-term impact of no-tillage on active bacterial communities is a topic which has not yet been sufficiently evaluated.…”

Towards Development of Eco‐Agriculture of Rainwater‐Harvesting for Supplemental Irrigation in the Semi‐Arid Loess Plateau of China

“…The idea of traditional rain‐fed agriculture is trying to obtain natural rainfall as much as possible and store it in situ for infiltration to increase its utilization efficiency (Casa and Lo Cascio 2008, Striker 2008). Conservation agriculture and runoff agriculture can regulate and control ineffective rainfall to a certain extent to reduce loss of water and soil and increase the rainwater utilization efficiency, but the improvement for soil water situation is very much limited.…”

“…2009). The eco‐agriculture of rainwater harvesting for supplemental irrigation is a kind of rainwater‐harvesting runoff‐collecting applied technology and anti‐evaporation technology, which will be the hope of modern agricultural agriculture in semiarid Loess Plateau of China after conservation agriculture and runoff agriculture (Li et al 2004, Casa and Lo Cascio 2008, Wang et al. 2008).…”