Soil tillage and agricultural crops affect greenhouse gas emissions from Cambic Calcisol in a temperate climate

Conventional soil tillage creates suitable conditions for plant growth, but it is an energy and labor-intensive technology causing ecologically unfavorable changes in the soil. In order to reduce GHG emissions from agricultural soils, reduced soil tillage and different crops have been proposed. However, the impact of individual practices on GHG emissions is affected by multiple on-site variables and is limited to different soil types and climate zones. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the impact of two soil tillage treatments and four agricultural crops on GHG emissions from clay soil in temperate climate. During the growing seasons from 2018 to 2021, we measured soil flux of N₂O, CH₄ and CO₂ using a Picarro G2508 on a broad multifaceted field experiment with two tillage treatments. This study shows that winter wheat with conventional tillage treatment may emit significantly lower N₂O emission (8.3 g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹) and higher CH₄ assimilation (−11.9 g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹) in warmer and drier growing season compared to winter wheat (26.1 g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹ and −3.3 CH₄ g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹, respectively) and spring barley (11.1 g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹ and −2.9 g ha⁻¹ day⁻¹, respectively) with reduced tillage treatment in cooler and wetter growing season (p<0.05).