Incidence of soil N fertility on the performance of organic forage legume-wheat mixtures.

Summary

One of the key issues of organic arable systems is to bring enough nitrogen in the crop rotation to ensure satisfying crop nutrition. Wheat yield in organic agriculture are generally low and variable. Grain yield and grain protein content are strongly affected by N deficiency and weed competition (Casagrande et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the autonomy of the organic cropping systems has to be improved while off-farm inputs have to be limited. The use of N2 fixation from legume plants should then be improved. Previous research had clearly demonstrated the benefits of forage legumes in association to improve N balance and control weed seed bank. However, it is also well known that legume N2 fixation could be limited depending on the soil N fertility. The functioning of such mixtures could then be disturbed by variations of the nitrogen fertility of the environment. The impact of soil N fertility has to be studied in order to manage whether above- and belowground interactions between species and to optimise benefits of the association.