Irrigation treatments, water use efficiency and crop sustainability in cereal-forage rotations in Mediterranean environment
Irrigation treatments, water use efficiency and crop sustainability in cereal-forage rotations in Mediterranean environment
Blog Article
Agricultural systems based on crop rotation animed blue lotion topical spray are beneficial to crop sustainability and productivity.Wheat-forage rotations combined with irrigation are the agronomic techniques best able to exploit Mediterranean environmental conditions.This paper describes a long-term field trial to ascertain the effect of combined irrigation and durum wheat-forage rotations on crop yield and soil chemical properties.The two forage crops: annual grass-clover winter binary mixture and perennial lucerne were carried out through 1991-2008 under rainfed and irrigated treatments.
The experiments were used to highlight the effect of irrigation and wheat-forage crop rotations on water use efficiency (WUE) and sustainability of organic matter (OM) in topsoil.Irrigation increased the dry matter (DM) of annual binary mixture and lucerne by 49.1% and 66.9%, respectively.
Continuous wheat rotation reduced seed yield (SY), stability of production, and crude protein (CP) characteristics of kernel and OM in topsoil.The yearly gain in wheat after forage crops was 0.04 t (ha yr)-1 under rainfed and 0.07 t (ha yr)-1 under irrigation treatments.
The CP and soil OM of wheat forage crops rotations, compared with those of continuous wheat under rainfed and irrigated was a 0.8 and 0.5 % increase in CP and 5.1 and 4.
4 in OM, respectively.The rotations of annual grass-clover winter binary mixture and lucerne meadow under both irrigated treatments increased the OM over continuous wheat (9.3 % and 8.5 in annual grass-clover winter binary mixture and 12.
5 and 9.5 lucerne meadow under rainfed and irrigation, respectively).Irrigation reduced the impact of weather on crop growing, reducing water u11-200ps use efficiency (mean over rotations) for DM production (15.5 in meadow and 17.
5 in annual grass-clover winter binary mixture [L water (kg DM)-1]) and wheat SY.However, the agronomic benefits achieved by forage crops in topsoil are exhausted after three years of continuous wheat rotation.