Effect of soil tillage technologies on soil properties in long term evaluation

Abstract

Soil compaction is a major problem of modern agriculture. Soil compaction increases due to growth of the weight of agricultural machines and the number of passes over land. Soil compaction may be significantly reduced by using suitable soil tillage. One indicator of compaction can be cone index. It was established field trial with six variants of tillage. On 3 variants were used ploughing systems and other 3 used reduced systems of tillage. Experiment was conceived as a multi-annual and was run from 2010 to 2014. The soil on the land was shallow sandy loam cambisol. Registration penetrometer was used for measurement. Cone index was measured at the depth of 0.04 m to 0.32. Each plot had size 6 x 50 m. The results were evaluated after 5 years of the experiment. The results showed a difference of the cone index values between variants. The variants with ploughing are apparent initial favourable effect of loosening with a strong transition of not processed layers. There are no visible transitions in variants with reduced tillage. But the values of cone index in the surface layers have higher values than the variants with ploughingVytauto Didžiojo universitetasŽemės ūkio akademij