effects of residue management and cropping systems on wheat yield stability in a semiarid mediterranean clay soil残留管理和耕作制度对小麦产量的影响稳定的半干旱地中海粘土.pdfVIP

American Journal of Plant Sciences , 2011, 2, 202-216 doi:10.4236/ajps.2011.22022 Published Online June 2011 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ajps) Effects of Residue Management and Cropping Systems on Wheat Yield Stability in a Semiarid Mediterranean Clay Soil Rachid Mrabet Institut National de la Recherche AgroNomique (INRA), Regional Agricultural Research Centre of Tangier, Tangier, Morocco. Email: rachidmrabet@ Received February 11th, 2011; revised April 4th, 2011; accepted April 10th, 2011. ABSTRACT Agriculture is the single biggest user of land and water in Morocco ; however its performances are still low due to high rainfall variation and rates of soil productivity depletion. Increasing concerns about soil and environment quality deg- radation have raised the need to review existing tillage management systems and develop new systems for seed-bed preparation. Consequently , No-tillage is found a promising practice of soil management to improve simultaneously soil quality and wheat production in semiarid Morocco. However, residue management under No-tillage was not yet studied in conjunction with wheat rotation. Therefore, a field study was conducted in the semiarid Chaouia Plain of Morocco during the period from 1994 to 2003, in order to evaluate the impacts of different tillage practices (conventional tillage (CT), No-tillage (NT)); No-tillage wheat residue management scenarios (total NTr, partial NTp and No-removal of residues NTm) and crop rotations (continuous wheat (CW), Wheat-Fallow (WF), Wheat-Maize-Fallow (WMF), Wheat-Lentil-Fallow (WLF) and Wheat-Barley-Fallow (WBF)) on wheat production. Over-years, conventional tillage system permitted lower yield of wheat while NT maintenance of crop residue at the surface is needed to increase it. Ba- sically, NTp could be adopted in mixed crop-livestock systems of semiarid areas for the purpose of guarantying grain