No-till farming system has been extensively studied all over the world as the effective method for maintaining the soil fertility. The general advantages of this system have been well known for reducing the labor, fuel, machinery, and irrigation cost as well as for increasing the soil quality through soil aggregation, water infiltration, microbial population and etc. Recently, it becomes more popular with the increase of interest on sustainable agriculture, especially because of its higher carbon sequestration potential compared to conventional tillage. Crop residue management should be essentially included to look forward to achieving the positive effect on reduction of greenhouse gas. Nonetheless, there are also negative opinions on effect of no-till farming system. For example, some researchers reported that soil physical properties were not improved by no-till under certain soil and climatic conditions. This means no-till farming systems were strongly affected by the soil characters and climatic conditions. Therefore, the researches to meet the specific-regional characters are greatly needed in order for no-till farming system to successfully settle in Korea. The objective of the review article is to present the future direction and perspective on no-till farming system in Korea. For this purpose, we summarized the results of domestic and foreign researches about no-till farming system until now. Specifically, the chapter on foreign research consisted of four parts: positive and negative effects, the effect in paddy soil, and latest research direction (2012-2013) of no-till farming systems. Whereas, review for domestic researches was divided into two main parts: paddy and upland soils. In the final chapter, the priorities for the optimum conservation tillage in Korea were discussed and proposed through the previous researches.

Assessment of sustainable production on a cropland can help to determine the most proper management practices. In this study, we evaluated the sustainable production on paddy field treated with green manure crops using sustainability index which based on nutrient index, microbiological index, and crop index related to nutrient-supplying capacity. Especially choosing appropriate indicators from a minimum data set (MDS) were used the principal components analysis (SI-2) as well as expert opinion (SI-1) usually used in sustainability index. Six treatments including the two tillage treatments and two green manure crops were investigated as follows; (i)