Impact of soil cultivation systems on chemical soil properties

The research included a static crop-rotation field experiment set up in 1993: sugar beet – winter wheat – faba bean – winter barley + stubble intercrop and covered the effect of three soil cultivation systems: A – ploughing cultivation, B – ploughless cultivation, C – direct sowing on selected chemical properties of soil sampled from three soil profile layers: 0 – 10 cm, 10 – 20 cm and 20 – 30 cm. The ploughless soil cultivation and direct sowing increased the contents of organic C, total N and available K and decreased the content of exchangeable Mg in the upper soil layers. The content of available P and exchangeable Ca did not depend on the factors studied significantly. Giving up ploughing cultivation and taking up direct sowing increased the sum of exchangeable bases and the tendency to decrease soil pHKCl.