Organic farmers across Saskatchewan face soil phosphorus (P) shortages. Due to the restriction on inputs in organic systems, farmers rely on crop rotation and naturally-occurring arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) for plant P supply. Crop rotation is important for disease, pest, and weed management. Crops that are not colonized by AMF (non-mycorrhizal) can decrease colonization of a following c...

this study was carried out to determine the best rotation with using plants as wheat, soybeans, canola and tomatoes for field planting area of 35 hectares, in 15 kilometers northwest of galikesh in 2010. to this end, by using the cropwat software, appropriate model was selected in terms of net profit and performance (output per unit of water used), in irrigated and rain fed conditions. accordin...

Crop rotation has been practiced for centuries in an effort to improve agricultural yield. However, the directions, magnitudes, and mechanisms of the yield effects of various crop rotations remain poorly understood in many systems. In order to better understand how crop rotation influences cotton yield, we used hierarchical Bayesian models to analyze a large ecoinformatics database consisting o...

Upland rice (Oryza sativa L.) is mainly grown in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Yield potential of upland rice is quite low and invariably this crop is subjected to many environmental stresses. Further, when upland rice is grown in monoculture for more than two to three years on the same land, allelopathy or autotoxicity is frequently reported. Allelopathy involves complex plant and plant chem...

Weeds are a major obstacle to successful crop production in organic farming. Producers may be able to reduce inputs for weed management by designing rotations to disrupt population dynamics of weeds. Population-based management in conventional farming has reduced herbicide use by 50% because weed density declines in cropland across time. In this paper, we suggest a 9-year rotation comprised of ...

Agricultural crop rotations have been shown to increase soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and microbial biomass. The mechanisms behind these increases remain unclear, but may be linked to the diversity of crop residue inputs to soil organic matter (SOM). We used a residue mixture incubation to examine how variation in longterm diversity of plant communities in agroecosystems influences decompositi...

Changes in soil microbiotic properties such as microbial biomass and community structure in response to alternative management systems are driven by microbial substrate quality and substrate utilization. We evaluated irrigated crop and forage production in two separate four-year experiments for differences in microbial substrate quality, microbial biomass and community structure, and microbial ...

Actinomycetes are involved in important environmental processes such as the decomposition of organic matter. In this study, we examined the impact of crop rotation on the actinomycetes community colonizing rice straw residues in soil over 3 field seasons by means of Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis (DGGE) fingerprinting analysis of actinomycetes 16S rRNA gene fragments amplified from fie...