The effectiveness of various methods of soil tillage in the cultivation of spring wheat in the forest-steppe of the Middle Volga region

The research was carried out in the Ulyanovsk research Institute IN 2016-2018, located in the forest-steppe zone of the Middle Volga region with an annual rainfall of 360 -500 mm. The soil of the experimental site was represented by slightly alkaline heavy-loam Chernozem with a humus content of 5.8 %. We studied the efficiency of dump, non-dump, minimum and zero tillage. The arable soil layer was characterized by favorable agrophysical properties, which practically did not depend on the methods of basic tillage, so the lumpy-granular macrostructure with the size of aggregates from 0.25 to 10 mm was 75.2% for plowing, 75.6-76.5% for the variants of mini-Mal and zero tillage. The soil in the arable layer was not re-compacted and corresponded to the optimal value for the growth and development of spring wheat plants (1.20-1.23 g / cm3). The number of water-line units with a diameter greater than 0.25 mm was high and did not fall below 74 %. Minimum and zero treatment contributed to a greater (8-25 %) accumulation and preservation of productive moisture in the soil during the entire growing season, compared with the dump treatment. The yield at mini-Mall and zero tillage was 2.87-2.88 t / ha, which is 0.16-0.17 t/ha higher than at dump-2.71 t / ha.