Influence of soil and relief on productivity of clover-timothy herbage

Abstract

Relevance. The article is devoted to the topical problem of studying the influence of soil conditions and the relief of an agricultural landscape on the yield of clover-timothy herbage on drained soils, knowledge of which makes it possible to optimize the production process of crops in the mode of adaptive landscape farming.Methods and results. The studies were carried out in 1998–2020 at the test site of the All-Russian Research Institute of Reclaimed Lands (VNIIMZ) – a branch of the Federal Research Centre Soil Science Institute named after V.V. Dokuchaev (Tver region), located within the end-moraine hill. The purpose of the research is to study the influence of soil conditions and the relief of the agricultural landscape on the yield of clover-timothy herbage of 1 year of use. Grass productivity monitoring was carried out on a transect – a field crossing the main microlandscape positions (relief elements) and elementary soil combinations of the agrolandscape. Crop productivity and other parameters of the vegetation and soil cover on the transect were taken into account on 30 systematically located plots, within which there are 4 replicates, 23 m2 in area, spaced 10 m from each other.Results of studies on productivity were processed by correlation and multivariate analysis of variance. Studies have shown that the relief and soil features of the agricultural landscape have almost the same effect on the crop yield. Each of these factors, on average, determined 18–16% of the spatial variability in productivity. About 2/3 of the variability in the yield of herbs depends on factors that are difficult to take into account. It was found that the degree of influence of the relief and soils on the yield of grasses is not constant over time and ranges from 2 to 33%. In the time series of observations, periods of synchronous and asynchronous fluctuations in the degrees of influence of soil and relief on the yield were distinguished. Synchronization of temporal fluctuations in the degrees of impact on the productivity of grasses of different elements of the landscape occurs with a decrease in the amount of precipitation and active temperatures. On the basis of the revealed patterns, it is possible to develop measures to adapt technologies for growing perennial grasses to the natural conditions of farms in the mode of adaptive landscape fodder production.

Efficiency of Precision Fertilization System in Grain-Grass Crop Rotation

“…According to Soon & Malchi [23], on the chernozems of northern China, their contribution to winter wheat crops is so significant that it exceeds the effect of nitrogen fertilizers. Under the conditions of the study region, its importance is often greater than that of the soilagrochemical factor [24,41]. In general, it can be argued that the results obtained confirm the current idea of the critical importance of an objective assessment and operative management of the production process of crops, taking into account landscape and ecological differentiation [24][25][26][27][28]42].…”

“…The main causes of fluctuations in the growth and development processes of cultures in the grain-grass crop rotation were the uneven distribution of the heat and moisture resources, the spatial heterogeneity of the agrophysical and agrochemical properties of the soil, and the very unstable geochemical regimes in individual AMLs, which were previously recorded [8,24,25].…”

“…Individual components of the cereals' productivity are formed in different stages of ontogeny. A complex combination of landscape-ecological, weather-climate and soilagrochemical conditions in each of them forms a whole mosaic of changing limiting factors and effects [29][30][31]. Their negative side is associated with the death of plants, the development of pathogens, the limitation of tillering processes, the initiation of generative organs, and grain formation, which often have a pronounced landscape localization.…”

“…The geophysical mapping of these conditions creates quite obvious theoretical prospects for the practice of differentiated application of fertilizers [8,21,22]. Often, the contribution of the current specifics of landscape and ecological conditions to the variability of crop yields is higher than that of soil heterogeneity or the most effective nitrogen fertilizers [23,24]. In some cases, this circumstance, along with the risks of loss of geochemical stability, serves as a basis for refusing the intensive use of fertilizers [25].…”

“…The obvious lack of field experimental data in this direction was pointed out earlier [28]. The rather contradictory nature of the available assessments of the responsiveness of individual grain crops [29][30][31] and perennial grasses [32][33][34] to the specifics of landscape-ecological and agrochemical conditions complicates the problem.…”