Prediction of Grass Mixture Crop Yield for the Purposes of Adaptive Landscape Agriculture

Long-term monitoring (1998–2023) of the yield of the first-year clover–timothy grass stands was carried out in order to find patterns of the effect of landscape environmental conditions on the yield under various agroclimatic conditions. The research was conducted within the confines of the moraine hill located at the Gubino VNIIMZ agro-testing site in Tver oblast. Soil-forming rocks are two-layered (within 1 m) deposits with the upper layer composed of relatively light rocks underlain by moraine boulder loam. The grass stands were exploited without fertilizers in a single-cut mode on a field divided into 120 plots. The regression analysis was used to determine the effect of the landscape and soil environment factors (terrain and physical and agrochemical soil properties) on grasses yield as well as dependence of the degree of the exposure to climatic conditions. It was found that the yield of perennial grasses is most strongly affected by various fractions of soil granulometric composition, ranging from stones to silt (up to 16% of its variability) and elevation of the location (up to 38%) since precisely these largely govern the thermal and water-air characteristics of soils and vegetation. Terrain characteristics, such as surface steepness and curvature, have an insignificant effect on grasses yield (up to 12%). The degree of exposure of grasses during the growth to agrolandscape environmental factors is largely regulated by fluctuations in weather conditions. Generally, “climate scenarios” of a specific factor, that is, sets of weather parameters, under which its effect on the crop production process is manifested, do not dramatically differ in the years of seeding and cutting. Knowledge of the character of the influence of climatic factors allows for predicting crop yields more accurately within the confines of an agricultural landscape and, thus, optimize crop arrangement in the territory of a particular farm