Fucui Li

Summer fallow soil management – impact on rainfed winter wheat

Summer fallow soil management is an important approach to improve soil and crop management in dryland areas. In the Loess Plateau regions, the annual precipitation is low and varies annually and seasonally, with more than 60% concentrated in the summer months from July to September, which is the summer fallow period in the winter wheat-summer fallow cropping system. With bare fallow in summer as a control, a 3-year location-fixed field experiment was conducted in the Loess Plateau to investigate the effects of wheat straw retention (SR), green manure (GM) planting, and their combination on soil water retention (WR) during summer fallow, winter wheat yield, and crop water use and nitrogen (N) uptake. The results showed that SR increased soil WR during summer fallow by 20 mm on average compared with the control over 3 experimental years but reduced the grain yield by 8% in the third year and the grain N content by 6–15% in all 3 years. In contrast, GM planting markedly reduced soil WR by 16 mm and 33 mm in the first and third year, respectively, but increased water use efficiency (WUE) by 16% in the third year and nitrate N accumulation in 0–100 cm soil at winter wheat sowing. Their combination did not significantly affect the soil WR or the soil nitrate N content in any of the 3 years, but did increase WUE by 11% in the third year and grain yield by 2.6% in the second year. In conclusion, the combination of SR and GM planting mitigated the negative effects of the individual measures, providing a feasible method for summer fallow management in the semiarid Loess Plateau in China and other similar regions.