Ditch-buried straw return: A novel tillage practice combined with tillage rotation and deep ploughing in rice-wheat rotation systems

Abstract Rice-wheat rotation is the main farming system in the Yangtze River regions, and plays a critical role in maintaining food safety in China. However, some serious issues are emerging during agricultural production. One is that long-term conservation tillage leads to shallow and stringent ploughing layers. The other is that large quantity of straws is difficult to effectively manage in the limited rotation gaps between both crops. Our group designed a novel soil tillage practice, ditch-buried straw return (DB-SR), to overcome such problems. In this chapter, we summarized our current advances from 10-year's research for DB-SR in the rice-wheat rotation systems. DB-SR showed excellent straw incorporation capability, improvements in soil ecological processes as well as positive effects on pest control, crop growth and final yield performance. Our results suggested that DB-DR is effective in sustaining crop production and has a great potential for extension in the rice-wheat rotation farming regions. However, we also need more agricultural engineering scientists to join us for developing an all-in-one machine which supports this novel soil tillage practice.