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Increase in maize yield and soil aggregate-associated carbon in North China due to long-term conservation tillage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2021

Ying Shen ,
Tingting Zhang ,
Jichao Cui ,
Siyu Chen ,
Huifang Han Open the ORCID record for Huifang Han [Opens in a new window]  and
Tangyuan Ning
Ying Shen
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
Tingting Zhang
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
Jichao Cui
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
Siyu Chen
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
Huifang Han*
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
Tangyuan Ning
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Key Laboratory of Crop Water Physiology and Drought Tolerance Germplasm Improvement, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Agronomy, Shandong Agricultural University, Tai’an, People’s Republic of China
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Summary

The North China Plain (NCP) is an important agricultural area, where conventional tillage (CT) is used year-round. However, long-term CT has damaged the soil structure, threatening agricultural sustainability. Since 2002, we have conducted a long-term tillage experiment in the NCP to explore the effects of different types of tillage on soil and crop yield. As part of long-term conservation tillage, we conducted a 2-year study in 2016/2017 to determine the impact of no tillage (NT), subsoiling (SS), rotary tillage (RT) and CT on soil aggregate distribution, aggregate-associated organic carbon (AOC), aggregate-associated microbial biomass carbon (AMBC), and maize yield. Compared to CT, NT increased the content of macro-aggregates (+4.8%), aggregate-AOC (+8.3%), and aggregate-AMBC (+18.3%), but decreased maize yield (−11.5%). SS increased the contents of macro-aggregates (+5%), aggregate-AOC (+14.7%), and aggregate-AMBC (+16%); although the yield increase was not significant (+0.22%), it had the highest economic benefit among the four tillage measures. RT had no significant advantage when considering the above soil variables; moreover, it reduced maize yield by 16.1% compared with CT. Overall, SS is a suitable tillage measure to improve soil macro-aggregate content, carbon content, yield, and economic benefit in the NCP area.

Keywords

Aggregate-associated carbonGrain yieldSubsoiling
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Agriculture , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , August 2021 , pp. 270 - 281
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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