No tillage outperforms conventional tillage under arid conditions and following fertilization

Highlights

● On average conventional tillage outperformed no tillage.

● Across fertilized trials, however, no tillage performed best.

● Aridity increases yield benefits of no tillage over conventional tillage.

● Fertile settings favor conventional tillage over no tillage.

Abstract

Reduced tillage practices present a tool that could sustainably intensify agriculture. The existing literature, however, lacks a consensus on how and when reduced tillage practices should get implemented. We reanalyzed here an extensive dataset comparing how regular tillage practices (i.e., conventional tillage) impacted yield of eight crops compared to stopping tillage altogether (i.e., no-tillage practice). We observed that aridity and fertilization favored no tillage over conventional tillage whereas conventional tillage performed better under high fertility settings. We further show that the responses are consistent across the crops. Our reanalysis complements the original and fills a gap in the literature questioning the conditions under which reducing tillage presents a viable alternative to common tillage practices.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Aridity / Crop production / Soil erosion / Sustainable agriculture / Tillage practices

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Acknowledgements

The article was drafted as a series of in-class activities of a postgraduate course on Scientific Writing at Sun Yat-sen University led by SDV. The authors other than SDV were attendants of the course and are listed alphabetically. The authors would like to thank the administrative authorities of the university that made this course possible. We thank the reviewers and editors that reviewed our article for helping us strengthen our manuscript.

Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s42832-022-0145-3 and is accessible for authorized users.

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