Long-Term Impact of Soil Management on the Physical and Hydraulic Properties of a Fine-Textured Soil: Insights on the Effects of Minimum Tillage and No-Tillage for Precision Farming Applications

Conservative agriculture is proposed as a valid alternative to conventional agriculture and to produce food in an eco-sustainable way, but it is necessary to verify its real applicability in some dry agro-environments. In this investigation, the impact of a long-term field experiment aimed at comparing the effects of soil management, conservative and conventional (i.e., no-tillage vs. minimum tillage), on physical and hydraulic properties of a fine-textured soil in southern Italy, was studied. Several soil physical and hydraulic properties were considered, including volumetric soil water content, dry bulk density, soil porosity, soil water retention curve, soil macroporosity, as well as hydrodynamic soil properties such as saturated and unsaturated hydraulic conductivity. Overall, the results showed that, at the end of a wheat crop cycle, undisturbed (NT) soil was significantly wetter and more compact but no less conductive than tilled (MT) one. However, the results also highlighted that long-term soil management impacted especially on the pore system characteristics (i.e., smaller, and better interconnected pores, in no-tillage), probably diversifying the ways in which water is transmitted in saturated soil. Further investigations are necessary to better understand the induced changes by conservative soil management systems, and thus, better support precision agriculture in such agro-environments.