Plant pathologists' traditional recommendations have been to clean-till fields. A few passes with the disk were good. Better yet, moldboard plow the residue under. Even better, burn the stubble, then plow it. Unfortunately, clean-tilling fields did not turn out to be a sustainable practice. Water and wind erosion claimed too much top soil and threatened to reduce the yield potential of our fiel...

Crop management practices (tillage, residue management, fertilization, etc.) define the soil environment to which crops are exposed and through these environmental conditions control crop growth. The purpose of this paper is to report the response of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) to long-term (10 years) application of fallow tillage practices (plow, sub-till, and no-till) and N fertilizat...

Soil N2O emissions from three corn (Zea mays L.)-soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] systems in central Iowa were measured from the spring of 2003 through February 2005. The three managements systems evaluated were full-width tillage (fall chisel plow, spring disk), no-till, and no-till with a rye (Secale cereale L. 'Rymin') winter cover crop. Four replicate plots of each treatment were establishe...

The use of sprinkler irrigation for rice (Oryza sativa L.) crop is a relatively recent practice in Brazil. Therefore, crop soil and fertilization management are still not very well defined. Another problem is the inexistence of specific cultivars adapted to this cropping system. This study aimed to evaluate sprinklerirrigated upland rice cultivars under different soil management practices and n...

Dryland farming in the Mediterranean climate of the Pacific Northwest, USA supports extremely low earthworm populations under conventional tillage. Increases in earthworm populations are being observed in fields under no-till cropping systems. A 30+ year experiment with four tillage levels in a pea (Pisum sativum L.)-winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) rotation was evaluated for earthworm popul...

Wilhelm, W.W., Schepers, J.S., Mielke, L.N., Doran, J.W., Ellis, J.R. and Stroup, W.W., 1987. Dryland maize development and yield resulting from tillage and nitrogen fertilization practices. Soil Tillage Res., 10: 167-179. Conservation tillage ( 7 30% residue cover) has proven to be very effective in reducing runoff and erosion and in increasing soil water storage. In dryland cropping situation...

To study Assessing the impact of tillage practices on soil carbon losses dependents it is necessary to describe the temporal variability of soil CO2 emission after tillage. It has been argued that large amounts of CO2 emitted after tillage may serve as an indicator for longer-term changes in soil carbon stocks. Here we present a two-step function model based on soil temperature and soil moistur...

Crop growth models can be useful tools in evaluating the impacts of di€erent tillage systems on the growth and ®nal yield of crops. A tillage model was incorporated into CROPGRO-Soybean and tested for conditions in Ames, IA, USA. Predictions of changes in surface residue, bulk density, hydraulic conductivity, runo€ curve number, and surface albedo were consistent with expected behaviors of thes...

In cold climates, snowmelt runoff often exceeds rainfall runoff during the year. Conservation tillage practices may be effective in reducing runoff during the cropping season but not during the snowmelt period. A plot study was conducted on a cropped hillslope to assess how tillage practices affect snowmelt runoff and the associated losses of sediment, phosphorus (P), and chemical oxygen demand...

rotation is also more effective in preventing deep leaching of nitrate N than continuous corn (Katupitiya et al., Reduced tillage, including no-till, and crop rotation are common 1997; Varvel and Peterson, 1990). Reduced stress from practices for corn (Zea mays L.) and soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] production in the Midwest. Benefits of no-till vary with latitude pests may be one of the reas...