RESEARCH ARTICLE
Labile and Recalcitrant Carbon in Crop Residue and Soil under No-Till Practices in Central Region of Argentina
A. Abril*, N. Casado-Murillo, C. Vazquez, P. Olivera
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2013Volume: 7
First Page: 32
Last Page: 39
Publisher ID: TOASJ-7-32
DOI: 10.2174/1874331501307010032
Article History:
Received Date: 11/08/2012Revision Received Date: 25/11/2012
Acceptance Date: 03/12/2012
Electronic publication date: 08/2/2013
Collection year: 2013
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
We evaluated the effects of the amount and type of C compounds (labile/recalcitrant) of crop residues on the soil organic matter (SOM) components under no-tillage practices in semiarid region of Argentina, with the aim of establishing criteria for sustainable agriculture. Five agricultural situations were evaluated: soybean/wheat rotation (wheat crop and at bare fallow); soybean monoculture; soybean/maize rotation and maize/wheat/potato rotations with biannual ploughing. In each situation crop residues and soil samples were collected. In residue samples, biomass (total and components), organic carbon, insoluble fibers, and soluble C compounds were evaluated. In soil samples total SOM, non-humic substances (NHS), humic substances (HS), humic (HA), and fulvic acids (FA) were analyzed. The total biomass and its components differed among situations and were lower in the situation with plough, while the fiber contents were higher in situations that includes wheat crop. Total SOM, NHS, HA content were higher in the plowed situation (57.20 g kg-1, 47.30 g kg-1, 7.80 g kg-1 respectively). We concluded that the total SOM quantity in continuous no-tillage is not affected by the different crop rotations and sequences, but the HA quantity (stable SOM) seems to be favored by the high recalcitrant compounds amount of the crop residues (particularly wheat). For these reasons, the following criteria for sustainable agriculture management in semiarid zones can be suggested: a) continuous no-tillage utilization; b) summer crop annual rotations; and c) winter wheat crop instead of bare fallow.
