Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agronomy, Vol. LXIV, Issue 1
Written by Carmen ZAFIU, Mircea MIHALACHE
Conservation agriculture implies practices that are applied in such a way as to cause minimum damage to the environment. Conservation practices, the most important aspect of conservation agriculture, are widely supported worldwide, and it is considered that they take care of soil health, plant growth and the environment. The growing concern for food security through improved soil management techniques requires the identification of a sustainable, environmentally friendly and ecological system that would also ensure a high yield for the cultivated plants. Research reports have identified more benefits of conservation practices, than of conventional practices, in terms of crop yields. Moreover, while no less than 25% of greenhouse gas emmissions released into the atmosphere are attributed to agriculture, research in relation to the processes of climate change mitigation and adaptation found that the zero tillage (ZT) practice is the most environmentally friendly among different processing techniques. Therefore, conservation practices involving zero tillage and minimal tillage, which have the potential to break up the compact surface area of the soil with reduced soil disturbance, provide a better soil environment and a crop yield with minimum impact on the environment. In this context, in 2019, an experiment was performed in order to analyze the influence of cultivation practices on maize yield in Urzicuta locality, Dolj County, in the Sourthern Oltenia Region of Romania. In this experiment, two tillage systems were applied, with A representing the applied soil practices (a1-conventional tillage and a2 - minimum tillage), each with control and fertilized variants, as following - b1-control, b2-N100P50K0, b3-N100P50K50, b4-N150P50K50 and b5-N100P0K0. While following the development of maize in both systems and for each variant, this paper aims to identify the best system that would ensure an increased yield for the cultivation of maize in the specified region.
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