Descripción
Andalusia, located in the south of Spain, is the
main olive producer in this country, with the 60.2% of the total área cultivated
with this tree. This region produces the 39% of the world olive oil and 24% of
the table olive. However, this kind of production based on the tillage of the
soil produces many environmental problems. Especially related to the soil and carbon
dioxide losses associated not only to the sediment dragged, but also to the
combustion of gasoil and oxidation of the organic matter (OM) of the ground.
Conservation agriculture systems in woody crop, cover crops (CC), significantly
reduce soil losses. Also decrease the emission of CO2 to the atmosphere by two
ways: less fuel consumption, due to the suppression of the tillage, and
increase of the soil carbon sink, by enhancing its structure and providing
large amount of plant debris. The objective of this work is to quantify the
efficiency of the CC as a method to improve the soil carbon sink capacity in rainfed
olive groves in semiarid climates. The study was carried out during 4 seasons
in 5 experimental fields distributed in different olive-growing regions. In two
different soils management systems, conventional tillage (CT) and CC, were measured
diverse parameters as: OM associated to sediments and temporal evolution of the
amount of OM in the ground. After 4 year of experimentation, we observed that
the CC promoted an average reduction of the losses of the OM associated to
sediments of 67.7%. Respect to the improvement of carbon sink in the soil, both
management systems provide positive results, by increasing the carbon stock.
However, these values were significantly higher in CC, 15.88.Mg ha-1y-1,
respect to the 3.57 Mg ha-1y-1 of the CT.
Márquez, F. et al (2012) Improvement of the soil carbon sink using
cover crops in rainfed olive orchards in semiarid climates. Agrociencia, 16(3),
pp. 280-287.
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