Conventional vs. organic cropping systems: yield of crops and weeds in Mediterranean environment

Summary

Agriculture must meet the twin challenge of feeding a growing population while simultaneously of minimizing its global environmental impacts. The organic farming, which is a system aimed at producing food with minimal harm to ecosystems, is often proposed as a possible solution. However, critics argue that organic agriculture may give lower yields and therefore more land is required in order to produce the same amount of food of the conventional farms, resulting in more widespread deforestation and biodiversity loss, thus undermining the environmental benefits of organic practices.
The long-term experiment was established in 2001 in order to compare organic vs. conventional cropping systems and inversion vs. non-inversion soil tillage. A 3-year crop rotation (chickpea, durum wheat and tomato)was established in both cropping systems. In the organically managed cropping system, the crop rotation was implemented with hairy vetch and oilseed rape cover crops which were green manured before tomato transplanting and chickpea sowing, respectively (Fig. 1). The soil tillage were: (i) inversion tillage consisting in moldboard plowing (depth of 30 cm) + disc harrowing; (ii) non-inversion tillage consisting in subsoiling (depth of 20 cm) + disc harrowing.
In this poster are reported the results of 2013/2014 cropping season on the yield and weed biomass observed in durum wheat, chickpea and tomato crops.