The impacts of soil tillage combined with plastic film management practices on soil quality, carbon footprint, and peanut yield

Soil tillage and plastic film management practices are essential agricultural production strategies for improving crop yield. Furthermore, they can also play important roles in affecting soil quality, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and carbon footprint (CF), and the overall impacts of tillage and plastic film management on these indicators and the potential links among them are rarely assessed. A 4-year-long field experiment was performed under the winter wheat–summer peanut rotation pattern to investigate how the tillage (plow tillage and rotary tillage) and plastic film management practices (plastic film mulching and no plastic film mulching) affected the summer peanut fields' soil quality (soil carbon (C) stock, enzyme activity, and nutrients concentration), soil GHG (N2O and CH4) emissions, CF components, and peanut yield. The present results showed that plow tillage management improved peanut yield and decreased seasonal cumulative soil N2O and CH4 emissions and CF relative to rotary tillage management. However, the seasonal cumulative emissions of soil N2O and CH4 under plastic film mulching were higher than those under no mulching. The application of plastic film mulching also increased soil TOC stock, soil enzymes (invertase, unease, and catalase) activities, and soil nutrients (microbial biomass C, microbial biomass nitrogen (N), ammonium N, and nitrate N) concentrations. The mulching-induced improvements in soil quality can promote an increase in crop productivity; thus, plastic film mulching showed increased peanut yield and decreased yield-scaled CF. In conclusion, plow tillage combined with plastic film mulching (PTM) treatment maintained higher peanut productivity and produced lower CF while generating suitable soil conditions and therefore may be a more high-yielding, eco-friendly, and sustainable development management strategy for summer peanut production.