Improved no-till seeding performance in Northern China using powered-chain residue manager

Abstract

Conservation tillage (CT) is defined as a system of planting (seeding) crops into untilled soil by opening a narrow slot, trench or band only of sufficient width and depth to obtain proper seed coverage. No other soil tillage is done (Phillips and Young, 1973). This has been demonstrated and extended by the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture (Gao et al., 1999) in the annual double-cropping (winter wheat - Triticum aestivum, L., and summer maize - Zea mays, L.) regions of northern China since 1997. No-till seeding of maize after wheat harvest has been achieved with increasing success in these regions and several small–medium-sized no-till maize seeders have been developed for these conditions (Li et al., 2000), but no-till seeding of wheat after maize harvest is still a problem (Gao et al., 2003). No-till wheat seeders, equipped with various kinds of maize residue anti-blocking mechanisms (e.g. strip-choppers, powered cutting discs), were designed to cut through maize stubble (Yao et al. 2009). In annual double-cropping regions of northern China, the strip-till seeder using a powered rotor to till shallow strips ahead of the seed opener is the most widespread option to plant crops into stubble, but with high power consumption and soil disturbance. This approach was shown to reduce soil water storage and retention capacity due to low residue cover on seedbeds (Wei et al., 2005), which does not conform to the principles of conservation agriculture. A power chain unit residue management attachment for a more conventional no-till seeder unit has since been developed to overcome these problems, and this paper reports a comparative evaluation of the powered-chain no-till seeder (PCNTS) and strip till seeder (STS).