Assessment of Productivity, Energy Balance and Soil Fertility under Conservation Tillage in Soybean-Chickpea Sequence on Vertisols under Rainfed Condition

Conservation agriculture is characterized by three principles which are linked to each other, namely; continuous minimum mechanical soil disturbance, continuous organic soil cover, diversified crop rotations in the case of annual crops or plant associations in case of perennial crops. Excessive tillage of agricultural soils may result in short term increases in fertility, but will degrade soils in the medium term. Soil erosion resulting from soil tillage has forced us to look for alternatives and to reverse the process of soil degradation. The logical approach to this has been to reduce tillage. The experiment on conservation tillage was undertaken at AICRP for Dryland Agriculture, Dr. PDKV, during 2018-19 and 2019-20. The results indicated higher soil moisture status at various crop growth stages and highest yield of soybean and chickpea was observed in reduced tillage as compared to other treatments. It was also observed that reduced tillage has given higher net returns and B:C ratio of soybean and chickpea than other treatments. Reduced tillage with BBF and crop residue mulch helped in slight build up in organic carbon and available nutrients in soil. The average energy use efficiency (6.62) and energy productivity (2.98) was found highest in reduced tillage with BBF.