Soil Responses to Long-term No Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in Central Kentucky

Land management practices such as no tillage and plowing influence soil physical and chemical characteristics. In this experiment, the effects of no-tillage and long-term conventional systems on selected soil properties were determined in a continuous corn system on a Maury silt loam soil. The soil used from this research is located at University of Kentucky\u27s Research Farm. The field was tilled in 1969 from bluegrass sod and the first year\u27s data was in 1970. Each plot is 20 ft. by 40 ft. and for many years each plot was split with rye or hairy vetch. The rye is continued to be used even when they stopped using hairy vetch. The rye is plowed under every spring in the conventional plots and killed with herbicides in the No-Till plots. This research field represents 48 years of continuous no till agriculture under continuous corn. Each replication contains four rates of nitrogen applied every spring at 0, 84, 168, and 336 kg/ha. In this experiment, the soil samples were collected from the no till and conventional tillage at 0 and 168 kg/ha of N at the depth of 0 to 7.5 cm and 7.5 to 15 cm on June 26, 2017. The samples were analyzed for soil organic carbon, soil aggregates, C in macroaggregates, soil pH, particulate organic matter, and soil porosity. The results indicate that tillage practice and soil depth were two important factors affecting the soil properties, and conservation tillage practices improve both physical and chemical properties of soil