Abstract
The cultivation of cover crops is a vegetative practice considered an alternative for sustainable soil management, due to its beneficial action in different aspects of soil properties. Thus, the present work aimed to evaluate the effect of cultivation of different species of cover crops on soil density, porosity and diameter of soil aggregates. The experimental design was in randomized blocks, with four replications. The treatments consisted of four species of winter green manure: black oat, forage turnip, forage pea, and common vetch, a consortium of black oat + forage turnip and area kept fallow (control). The following evaluations were performed: dry matter production of cover crops, macroporosity, microporosity, total porosity, soil density, geometric mean diameter and weighted average diameter. The cultivation with forage turnip and the consortium of black oat + forage turnip presented higher dry matter productivity, decreased soil density, increased soil porosity, improved the distribution in relation to macropores and aggregate stability.
Highlights
Soil quality is defined as the efficiency of a soil in maintaining its productive capacity
The highest dry matter yield was observed with the forage turnip and the consortium of black oat + forage turnip, with an average productivity of these of 4885 kg ha-1
Black oat showed an intermediate yield of 3178 kg ha-1 (Figure 2)
Summary
Soil quality is defined as the efficiency of a soil in maintaining its productive capacity. The use of inadequate soil and crop management techniques, such as soil tillage methods that intensely mobilize the arable layer, are the main promoters of changes in soil physical properties, causing the degradation of the structure, by fractionation of macroaggregates, and reducing pore continuity. These processes, associated with the intense traffic of agricultural machinery and the downward movement of dispersed clays, promote the approximation of soil particles, resulting in increased density (Kochhenn & Denardin, 2000). As a consequence of the physical degradation of the soil structure, there are changes in the physical attributes of the soil that control processes related to the dynamics of water, air, heat and root growth (Shi et al, 2012; Guimarães et al, 2013)
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