Elsevier

Soil and Tillage Research

Volume 174, December 2017, Pages 34-44
Soil and Tillage Research

Quantitative soil profile-scale assessment of the sustainability of long-term maize residue and tillage management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.still.2017.05.010Get rights and content

Highlights

  • No-till with residue showed higher Soil Health Scores compared to plow-till.

  • No-till with residue maintained subsoil air-filled porosity similar to sod.

  • No-till without residue showed poor soil health condition at the transition layer.

  • No-till without residue caused subsoil nutrient mining.

  • Percent variance explained by fixed and random factors assessed by novel statistics.

Abstract

Both surface and subsoil layers can be a significant source of soil moisture and nutrients for crop growth, but the changes in subsoil properties due to management are rarely assessed. This study was conducted to determine tillage and residue management effects on soil nutrient availability, as well as soil biological and physical conditions throughout soil layers ranging from 0 to 60 cm. We utilized an experiment with 40-year long continuous maize (Zea mays L.) cropping under crossed plow-till (PT) vs. no-till (NT) and residue removed (Harv) vs. residue returned (Ret) treatments on a silt loam soil in Chazy, NY. We assessed soil properties that are indicative of soil processes important for crop growth. Soil physical indicators (texture, bulk density (BD), water stable aggregation (WSA), available water capacity (AWC), and air-filled porosity (AFP)), soil biological indicators (soil organic matter (SOM), permanganate oxidizable carbon, mineralizable carbon, and soil protein), and soil chemical indicators (pH and plant available nutrients) were measured at five depth increments (0–6, 6–18, 18–30, 30–45, and 45- to 60-cm depth). A novel statistical approach of marginal R2 (R2m) was used to show percent variance of each measured soil indicator explained by tillage and residue management as well as the depth of soil sample. R2m was higher for soil biological indicators (0.66 < R2m < 0.91), compared to AWC and those nutrients that are not applied through fertilizer application (0.11 < R2m < 0.53). NT-Ret showed the highest concentration of majority of the measured soil nutrients, and higher accumulation of SOM related properties across depths. This was partly explained by favorable soil physical conditions indicated by BD, WSA, and AFP at the transition layer (18- to 30-cm depth) that allowed for the vertical exchange of soil water, nutrients, and SOM related properties between the topsoil and the subsoil layers. The PT treatments showed the absence of SOM transfer across the transition layer, whereas NT-Harv showed nutrient depletion at the transition and subsoil layers. This study revealed significant alteration of soil biological, chemical, and physical indicators depending on the treatment combinations, which can be ignored if surface sampling is solely used. Benefits of residue return appear more significant when combined with no-till for 1) providing better soil physical conditions and 2) maintaining adequate nutrient availability across a soil profile especially when considering subsoil properties.

Introduction

The health of soils impacts their ability to perform critical functions, including the support of crop growth. In rainfed agriculture, limited or excessive amounts of soil moisture during critical growth stages are important regulators for yield levels and yield stability (Calviño et al., 2003), and subsoil layers (>30 cm depth) have been identified as an important source of soil moisture (Ewing et al., 1991, Gaiser et al., 2012, Kirkegaard et al., 2007) and nutrients (Carter and Gregorich, 2010, Gransee and Merbach, 2000, Heming, 2004). Distinct soil microbial communities may also be present in subsoil layers compared to surface layers due to unique nutrient dynamics, soil physical properties, and redox potential (Fischer et al., 2013, Leininger et al., 2006), and can be a sink for a large amount of soil organic carbon (SOC; Batjes, 1996). However, limited attention has been paid to the effects of land management on subsoil soil properties even with this recognized importance of subsoil functions (Baker et al., 2007; Rumpel and Kögel-Knabner, 2010).

One such land management technique is the removal of crop residue. In recent years, the use of crop residue has been debated due to increasing demand for biofuel production (Lal and Pimentel, 2007), and a US-wide assessment indicating that less than 28% of maize (Zea mays L.) residue can be collected sustainably (Graham et al., 2007). Any management change in the amount of biomass and nutrient removal from a field needs to be evaluated carefully. Many of current evaluations are constrained by factors including i) the depth of soil sampling, and ii) particular focus on a narrow set of soil measurements. For fields under crop production, tillage practices are known to significantly affect the vertical distributions of SOC, and no-till (NT) showed to have higher SOC stocks in the surface layer (0–10 cm) while moldboard plow (PT) treatments have higher stocks in the deeper layers (20–40 cm) across eight sites of varying soil types in eastern Canada (Angers et al., 1997). The assessment of residue removal under NT solely in the topsoil may miss potential depletion of SOC in the subsoil layer, which have been found to rely on the exchanges to and from topsoil via plant root systems and soil fauna (Kautz et al., 2013), and dissolved SOM by preferential flow (Rumpel and Kögel-Knabner, 2010). Under PT systems, assessment of soil physical conditions at the interface between the plow layer (cultivated soil layer) and the subsoil may also be important to determine whether the vertical exchange of SOC is not restricted (Peigné et al., 2013).

Although SOC is a fundamental property related to numerous soil functions and an important component of global C cycle (Magdoff and van Es, 2009), it does not fully address the changes in soil conditions for plant growth, nor does higher SOC necessarily mean higher crop productivity (Sojka et al., 2003). There is a need to assess how the changes in the vertical distribution of SOC through residue removal impact the soil’s biological, chemical, and physical conditions, important for crop production, across the soil profile. In recent years, combinations of soil measurements including i) soil biological assessment of total and labile components of soil organic matter (SOM), ii) soil physical assessment of water stable aggregation (WSA), available water capacity (AWC) and soil strength, and iii) soil nutrient and pH indicators have been shown to be important in determining yield constraints, and have been utilized as a soil health or soil quality test (Idowu et al., 2008, Karlen et al., 2001, Schindelbeck et al., 2008). Such a set of measurements has been successfully applied to detect aspects of soil degradation caused by tillage (Moebius-Clune et al., 2008, Van Eerd et al., 2014) and land use change (Moebius-Clune et al., 2011). Aziz et al. (2013) assessed the effects of 5 year tillage and crop rotation on soil quality and showed NT to have higher soil microbial biomass and activity, total C and N, permanganate oxidizable C (POXC), WSA, and particulate organic matter compared to PT in 0- to 30-cm depth on a silt loam soil. The evaluation of the interactions among soil biological, chemical, and physical properties also helps to determine the mechanisms behind the changes in soil conditions due to particular soil and crop management practices. Therefore, there is a need to utilize soil health test framework across the soil profile to thoroughly assess the effects of residue and tillage management.

This study was conducted on 40-year continuous maize experimental plots with tillage and maize residue management treatments. Our hypothesis is that PT creates a root growth-restricting layer that does not allow the effective movement of residue-derived organic materials and nutrients through the subsoil. Also, we hypothesize that the absence of residue return causes unfertilized nutrients to become depleted, especially from the deeper soil layers where the amount of root residue is lower.

The objective of this study was to investigate the degree of impacts of surface tillage and crop residue management on surface as well as subsurface layer soil conditions using soil physical, chemical, and biological indicators.

Section snippets

Study site

The study site is located in Chazy, NY (44°53′N, 73°28′W) to test the effects of tillage (PT vs. NT) and residue management (residue returned (Ret) vs. residue harvested (Harv)) in two by two factorial design. Each plot (6 by 15.2 m) was arrayed in randomized complete block design with four replicated plots for each treatment combination.

The experiment was established in 1973 after many years of continuous mixed grass sod (SOD) while the periphery was maintained as SOD. Continuous maize cropping

The magnitude of influence of tillage and residue management on measured soil properties

Marginal R2 values were calculated for each fitted mixed model using tillage management, residue management, depth of soil samples, and their interactions as fixed factors (Nakagawa and Schielzeth, 2013). We found this statistic extremely useful in showing how much these fixed factors impact each measured soil indicator regardless of inherent soil property variations among the experimental blocks and plots. The R2m values were higher for soil biological indicators (0.66  R2m  0.91; Table 1)

Conclusions

This paper presents the importance of surface crop and soil management on surface (0- to 18-cm depth), transition (18- to 30-cm depth) and subsoil layer (30- to 60-cm depth) soil biological, chemical, and physical conditions. We show that no-till (NT) combined with crop residue return (Ret) maintains soil conditions closest to the original continuous mixed sod, compared to plow till (PT) or residue harvested (Harv) treatments, across the soil profile. Crop residue return was important to avoid

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Daniel Moebius-Clune and Kirsten Kurtz for assistance in laboratory soil assessment, Erika Mudrak for advices in statistical analyses, and Michael Davis for maintaining the long-term field experiments. Timothy Fahey, David Rossiter, Jeff Melkonian, and two anonymous reviewers provided us with invaluable suggestions. Funding was partly provided through the Northern New York Agricultural Development Program and a graduate scholarship from the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate

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