Key Points
- Understanding how continuous cropping effects soil quality is important for designing rotations that sustain high levels of production. Soil aggregate stability is a common measure of soil quality.
- Maintaining soil aggregate stability is important to allowing adequate movement of air, water and nutrients into the soil profile and avoiding surface capping and water runoff.
- Mixed cropping (crop/grass phases) maintain higher soil aggregate stability than intensive cropping.
- The benefits of mixed cropping depend on length of the grass phase (more is better).
- Granular, Gley, Recent & Brown soils are most susceptible to aggregate stability decline under cropping.
- The effects of continuous cropping and benefits of mixed cropping depend on the crop types sown.