The invisible subsoil compaction risk under no-till farming.

ABSTRACT: No-till (NT) is a key component of conservation agriculture aiming at producing crops with minimal soil disturbance. This land management practice offers numerous economic and ecological advantages over conventional tillage as evidenced by its rapid expansion since the 1960s, now practiced on 15% of the global arable land. Nevertheless, various crops exhibit persistent yield losses even decades after transition to NT. Here, we demonstrate that the promise of beneficial and sustainable soil management may be undermined by a gradual and invisible threat of subsoil compaction. We report on a risk of subsoil compaction stemming from the episodic passage of heavy machinery (e.g., harvesters). The threat is of dynamic and asymmetric nature whenever compaction events occur more frequently than th

SUBMITTER: Keller T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12646215 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature