Influence of soil and relief on productivity of clover-timothy herbage

Abstract

Relevance. The article is devoted to the topical problem of studying the influence of soil conditions and the relief of an agricultural landscape on the yield of clover-timothy herbage on drained soils, knowledge of which makes it possible to optimize the production process of crops in the mode of adaptive landscape farming.Methods and results. The studies were carried out in 1998–2020 at the test site of the All-Russian Research Institute of Reclaimed Lands (VNIIMZ) – a branch of the Federal Research Centre Soil Science Institute named after V.V. Dokuchaev (Tver region), located within the end-moraine hill. The purpose of the research is to study the influence of soil conditions and the relief of the agricultural landscape on the yield of clover-timothy herbage of 1 year of use. Grass productivity monitoring was carried out on a transect – a field crossing the main microlandscape positions (relief elements) and elementary soil combinations of the agrolandscape. Crop productivity and other parameters of the vegetation and soil cover on the transect were taken into account on 30 systematically located plots, within which there are 4 replicates, 23 m2 in area, spaced 10 m from each other.Results of studies on productivity were processed by correlation and multivariate analysis of variance. Studies have shown that the relief and soil features of the agricultural landscape have almost the same effect on the crop yield. Each of these factors, on average, determined 18–16% of the spatial variability in productivity. About 2/3 of the variability in the yield of herbs depends on factors that are difficult to take into account. It was found that the degree of influence of the relief and soils on the yield of grasses is not constant over time and ranges from 2 to 33%. In the time series of observations, periods of synchronous and asynchronous fluctuations in the degrees of influence of soil and relief on the yield were distinguished. Synchronization of temporal fluctuations in the degrees of impact on the productivity of grasses of different elements of the landscape occurs with a decrease in the amount of precipitation and active temperatures. On the basis of the revealed patterns, it is possible to develop measures to adapt technologies for growing perennial grasses to the natural conditions of farms in the mode of adaptive landscape fodder production.