Agronomic performance of soybean in crop rotation systems

Abstract

Crop rotation consists of alternating plant species cultivation in the same agricultural land, aiming to provide nutrient replenishment in the soil through organic matter deposition, as well as mitigating the soil degradation caused by agricultural practices. However, due to the short list of known crops suitable for such application, a selection of species to be inserted to the system is of critical importance. The objective of this research was to study the agronomic performance of soybean in crop rotation systems. The experiment was conducted at the Experimental Farm of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of UFGD, Dourados-MS, in two cropping seasons: 2013/2014 and 2014/2015; using a randomized block design with thirteen treatments and four replications. Treatments consisted of crop rotation systems in two soybeans cropping seasons. Corn, brachiaria, canola, wheat, forage turnip, safflower, crotalaria, niger, crambe, white oat, vetch and sunflower were the selected species to be inserted in the rotation systems. Six variables were analyzed: plant height, height of first pod insertion, number of branches per plant, number of pods per plant, mass of 1000 grains and grain yield. All collected data was submitted to analysis of variance and the means comparisons were analyzed by the Scott-Knott test (5%). This study revealed that crop rotation is an agricultural technique that favors the grain yield of soybean. Furthermore, during autumn and winter, fallowing is not recommended for soybean cultivation