engleski

Current status and new possible challenges in soil tillage systems

Different soil tillage practices affect soil on many different ways but predominantly on its physical, chemical and biological aspects. Some of the tillage's most influential impacts are: water content and availability, temperature, aeration, structure, density, compaction, nutrient cycling, organic matter transformation and dynamics, organism population and diversity. Intensity of tillage disturbance of the soil determines many causality relations of all soil compounds and influence levels of soil degradation and adaptability for present and future crop production. In different agroecological regions as in very similar agroecological conditions, exist different and sometime very opposite approaches to philosophy of soil tillage in crop production which consequently result, from year-to-year, in significant variation of average crop yields. In spite of many efforts to be replaced with some less degradable soil tillage systems or technique, mouldboard ploughing still remains as main tillage system in Europe. In same time, in some other world regions situation is much better and ploughing appear only sporadically and rarely (eg. Canada, USA, South America, Australia). Reasons for this variability and sometimes very diversified approach in not simple and one-way explaining. Main reasons could be divided in two main groups: Economic and social development (eg. knowledge, tradition, technics, technology, science) and Agroecological conditions (eg. climate, soil, water, crop, landscape). In last few decades as a factor which needs to be unavoidable included in every serious calculation and / or plan for successful crop production is climate change. Changes of boundaries of some climatic indicators due to climate change (mainly precipitation and temperature), and through its expression, as drought for instance, could drastically affect agricultural production. Regarding this and above-mentioned specifics, today there are different concepts of crop production that exist on global scale. The main concepts that are needed to mention are Conservation agriculture, Sustainable land management and in recent times Climate smart agriculture. Every one of them are cross- connected and includes soil tillage as one of its most important pillars. Today, every advanced approach to crop production necessarily needs to include site- specific principles (based on agroecological conditions) in application of any measures in crop production, including soil tillage. These approaches need to be in way of reduced or conservation soil tillage systems. Main modern principles of soil tillage imply as main excluding mouldboard ploughing as necessary, less soil tillage trafficking, better organic matter (residue) management, prevention to soil degradation (primarily soil erosion), shallow residue incorporation or their leaving on surface.

soil tillage; soil degradation; modern approaches; crop production

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