Abstract:
It is suggested that conventional tillage operations exacerbate global environmental changes and
affect the sustainability of our food production systems. Therefore, no-till has been introduced as
one of the conservation agriculture practices to counteract these challenges. No-till has been
adopted by a substantial number of farmers in major cropping regions; however, its resilience
from large scale implementation has been overlooked. The majority of the studies have reported
only a few aspects of the no-till practice (e.g., yield, soil properties, etc.), often with contradicting
observations. To fill this gap, we present an approach that integrates long-term field experimental
data and modeling to quantify resilience at a watershed scale. The study was conducted in the
Kalamazoo River watershed located in Michigan, USA. Recharge, groundwater table, soil
moisture, yield, and net return were used as resilience metrics. The DSSAT sequence crop model
was developed for a corn-soybean-wheat rotation and calibrated using the yield and soil moisture
data from a long-term (1993–2019) experiment for the conventional and the no-till treatment
conducted within the study area. Soil moisture, recharge and yield were simulated, and the
recharge was fed into a calibrated groundwater model to analyze changes in groundwater heads.
The results illustrate clear evidence of higher recharge and net return under the no-till
treatment, which were statistically significant for all crops at the watershed scale. Moreover, the
no-till treatment consistently retained greater soil moisture than the conventional treatment,
thereby helping to mitigate the impacts of droughts. The rise in groundwater table as affected by
the adoption of no-till practices in this watershed has ranged between 0.1 and 0.5 m, depending
on the underlying groundwater system, and has the potential to beneficially affect the aquifers
and groundwater-dependent ecosystems. Therefore, the conservation agriculture could improve
the overall resilience of the row crop system
