Limited capability of organic farming and conservation tillage to enhance agroecosystem resilience to severe drought

作者：Raphaël Wittwer, Valentin H. Klaus, Emily Miranda Oliveira, Qing Sun, Yujie Liu, Anna K. Gilgen, Nina Buchmann, Marcel G. A. van der Heijden · 发表于：Agricultural Systems · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1016/j.agsy.2023.103721 · 被引用次数：25 · 研究领域：Climate change impacts on agriculture、Crop Yield and Soil Fertility、Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics

CONTEXT: Climate change increasingly threatens food security, particularly through prolonged phases of drought. It is therefore important to evaluate and develop arable cropping systems with an enhanced capability to withstand severe drought events to ensure food production. However, it is still poorly understood whether specific management strategies, in particular organic farming and conservation tillage that are thought to be more resilient to drought, can enhance the ability of agroecosystem to withstand drought. OBJECTIVE: The main objective of this study was, therefore, to test the ability of organic farming and conservation tillage practices to withstand drought within expected boundaries of climate scenarios for the end of the century. METHODS: This study summarizes the effects of drought (both natural and experimental) on the productivity of three arable crops (maize, pea-barley mixture and winter wheat) assessed in three consecutive years in a long-term cropping system field experiment. We tested whether four relevant cropping systems (i.e., conventional and organic with and without soil conservation tillage) differ in their ability to reduce the impact of drought on plant yield and crop performance. We studied conditions of moderate natural drought (summer 2018) and severe experimental droughts using rainout shelters (3 years) after 8 years of contrasting field management. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: We found pronounced and consistent yield reductions due to experimen...