Non-puddling practice for rice-based cropping system increases carbon sequestration in soil

In Indo-Gangetic Plains, intensive rice-based cropping systems with conventional crop establishment practices has been followed for many years. Contradictory results are reported about the effect of rice monoculture or rice-upland crop rotations on soil properties. While CA practices may sequester C into the soil organic C pool and improve soil health, in most cases, the practice of CA in rice-upland rotations is only partial; conservation tillage and residues retention are followed for upland crops only but not for rice. So, whatever benefits may accrue from CA practices followed for upland crops are lost by several wet tillage operations followed by puddling. In the EGP, rice-upland crop growers are now adopting CA increasingly, namely non-puddling of rice, in the intensive triple cropping systems (Alam et al. 2016; Haque et al. 2016). The incorporation of minimum tillage and retention of more residues in these systems of the EGP will change the dynamics of C in soil but nature of these changes has not been explored yet. The study was, therefore, conducted to determine the C cycling in soils of rice-upland triple cropping systems under CA practices