Research paper: Strategic tillage in conservation agricultural systems of north-eastern Australia
Strategic tillage in conservation agricultural systems of north-eastern Australia: why, where, when and how?
Yash Pal Dang1 & Anna Balzer1 & Mark Crawford2 & Vivian Rincon-Florez1 & Hongwei Liu1 & Alice Rowena Melland3 & Diogenes Antille3 & Shreevatsa Kodur3 & Michael John Bell1 & Jeremey Patrick Milroy Whish4 & Yunru Lai1 & Nikki Seymour5 & Lilia Costa Carvalhais1 & Peer Schenk1
1 School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
2 Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Toowoomba, Australia
3 University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia
4 CSIRO, Toowoomba, Australia
5 Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Toowoomba, Australia
The final publication is available at link.springer.com DOI 10.1007/s11356-017-8937-1
Farmers often resort to an occasional tillage (strategic tillage (ST)) operation to combat constraints of no-tillage (NT) farming systems. There are conflicting reports regarding impacts of ST and a lack of knowledge around when, where and how ST is implemented to maximise its benefits without impacting negatively on soil and environment. We established 14 experiments during 2012–2015 on farms with long-term history of continuous NT to (i) quantify the associated risks and benefits to crop productivity, soil and environmental health and (ii) explore key factors that need to be considered in decisions to implement ST in an otherwise NT system.
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