Soil Physical Quality After 21 Years of Cultivation in a Brazilian Cerrado Latosol

Abstract

Long-term studies aiming soil quality evaluation under different soil management strategies are no common. Long-term evaluations provided more reliable contributions to decision-making and practices adoption. This study evaluated the soil physical quality of a Brazilian Cerrado Latosol after 21 years of three different soil management strategies: disc plowing (DP), no-tillage (NT), and disc harrowing+subsoiling (DHS). In comparison to the reference, a soil from a native Cerrado area, the removal of the original vegetation and the implementation of the three soil management strategies increased the soil bulk density (Bd) and reduced soil porosity, macroporosity, soil organic carbon (SOC) and the size of water-stable aggregates, but did not change the glomalin-related soil protein (GRSP) contents and clay flocculation. Similar effects were diagnosed on soil physical quality when is considered only the three different management strategies, especially on soil porosity, Bd, size of water-stable aggregates, SOC and GRSP contents. Strategies of DP and NT increased soil resistance to penetration in the superficial layers, while the annual use of DHS reduced this soil mechanical characteristic. The NT system did not provide increasing of soil organic carbon in comparison to other management practices evaluated. In conclusion, removing the native vegetation affected soil physical quality, but the Brazilian Cerrado soil is resilient to physical damage even when different intensive farming practices are implemented for more than two decades. The limitation of the NT system in improving the soil physical quality is related to climate conditions that determine the non-maintenance of straw on the soil surface.

Supplemental Irrigation with Brackish Water Improves Carbon Assimilation and Water Use Efficiency in Maize under Tropical Dryland Conditions

“…Moisture contents were close to the soil field capacity value (7.21%) on most sampling dates, regardless of supplemental irrigation. The excess water supplied to the soil in the Rainy scenario resulted in water accumulation in the soil profile, with part lost to runoff and part percolated [24][25][26]. The storage of water in the soil in this scenario favored the maintenance of moisture with minimal need for supplementation, since torrential rains are usually interspersed with medium and low-intensity rains under tropical semi-arid conditions.…”

“…These results suggest that brackish water supplementation presents a small risk of soil salinization if the soil has good natural drainage. The adoption of practices such as leaching fractions and the application of amendments may enable the mitigation of negative effects of the application of brackish water on the soil under Severe Drought scenarios, thus preventing soil degradation [26,[31][32][33].…”

The role of bacterial diversity on the antibiotic and herbicide biodegradation in agricultural soils

“…Brazilian Cerrado is naturally composed by low fertility soils (Embrapa, 2018;Ngolo et al, 2019). Advances in conservation and cultivation practices, such as no-till and soil fertility correction via the input of lime and mineral fertilizers, made agriculture viable in this biome (Lemes et al, 2020;Spera et al, 2016).…”