Effect of minimum tillage, conventional tillage and plasticulture pattern on strawberry yield and water use efficiency in north east of Ahvaz

In recent decades, population growth has led to changes in dietary behavior and a significant increase in global demand for food production, which has led to the promotion of heavy use of agricultural land. water shortage in arid and semi-arid regions is one of the most important factor that affect crops production. The use of different conservation tillage methods such as minimum tillage and the use of organic and inorganic mulch as methods used in sustainable agriculture, can reduce water and energy consumption in an agricultural system. Soil water affects plant growth and development. So that even a small change in soil water content can significantly change the productivity of crops. Soil cover or mulch is one of the management strategies to increase water use efficiency of agricultural products.

In this study, research was conducted to investigate the effect of conservation tillage methods and plasticulture patterns on water use efficiency and strawberry crop yield in 1398. The water use efficiency was calculated to assess the effects of tillage and plastic covers in the field. . The experiment was conducted using of factorial design in the form of randomized complete blocks with three replications. The plots included two types of tillage systems (conventional and conservation) and three methods of plastic cover (planting under plastic, over plastic and without plastic coverage). This experiment was performed in 18 plots with dimensions of 0.8×15 meters. 3 rows were planted in each plot. The distance between sub-plots was 75 cm as a ridge, the distance between main plots was 1 and a half meters and the distance between replicates was 2 meters. Water use efficiency (WUE) is one of the most important indicators for measuring agricultural water productivity. This index is actually the ratio of the amount of product produced per amount of water consumed (evaporation-transpiration) of the plant. In this definition, instead of evaporating and transpiration of the plant, the amount of water used in the field can be replaced and the amount of crop production per unit volume of water used in irrigation can be obtained. The higher this ratio, the better the water consumption.

The two factors of tillage and planting pattern only affected soil moisture content at a depth of 0-10 cm and no significant effect was observed between different treatments at a depth of 10-20 cm. Minimum tillage in the pre-irrigation and post-irrigation stages has the highest moisture content. Conventional tillage disturbs the soil more than minimum tillage, increasing pores and unevenness of the soil surface, thereby increasing surface evaporation. Planting pattern had the highest moisture content and over plastic planting pattern had the lowest moisture content. Plastic cover is a barrier that prevents soil water from evaporating and keeps the root zone moisture regime at more stable levels, thus reducing the need for irrigation and preventing physiological disorders related to nutrients and water. There is no significant difference between tillage factor in two levels of conventional and low tillage and only planting pattern at 1% level has a significant difference. Different planting patterns significantly affected strawberry yield. According to the comparison of the average, the highest yield was related to the planting pattern on plastic and the lowest was obtained on the planting pattern without plastic. Since the yield of strawberries in different tillage methods was not significantly different and in this study the same amount of water was used in different methods. Therefore, tillage methods had no significant effect on strawberry water productivity.

The data was shown that the use of conservation tillage and plasticulture increased soil moisture retention by 22% which is due to the prevention of evaporation of soil moisture by Plastic mulch and Plant residue cover and less soil disturbance in conservation tillage. Conservation tillage has no significant effect on strawberry yield due to the slow trend in changing soil properties, but plastic mulch increased strawberry yield by 31.71% due to the increase in soil moisture retention. Since the type of tillage did not have a significant effect on strawberry yield in this study, therefore, tillage does not have a significant effect on water use efficiency, but different planting patterns, due to affecting yield, significantly increase water use efficiency here.