Does a conservation farming approach manage the balancing act between soil health and yield stability? – a case study from a core agricultural region in Austria

The aim of this project is to evaluate whether conservation agriculture can increase soil health compared to conventional agriculture while maintaining the same yield level and stability, or whether there are trade-offs between these effect sizes. A field experiment established at UFT Tulln in 2015 is used for this purpose. The following two systems are compared: (i) a system with local conventional crop rotation (sugar beet-winter wheat-maize-winter wheat) and turning tillage and (ii) a conservation system with an eight-crop rotation (sugar beet-winter wheat-maize-soybean-winter wheat-sunflower-winter legume-winter wheat), reduced tillage and extended intercropping. The trial will be in its ninth harvest year in 2023; system effects can therefore be expected in the meantime. The following soil health parameters will be evaluated at two soil depths: (i) total soil carbon and nitrogen pools, (ii) microbial biomass, (iii) available organic carbon and nitrogen, (iv) nitrogen mineralization potential, (v) potential enzyme activity and (vi) aggregate stability. In addition, the two systems are evaluated with regard to their humus balance and nitrogen use efficiency. Furthermore, yield data for all crops over the entire trial period can be used; this allows a pairwise comparison of the yields of sugar beet, winter wheat and maize, which are grown in both systems after the same previous crops.