Tillage effect on C stocks of a clayey Oxisol under a soybean-based crop rotation in the Brazilian Cerrado region

A large area (180 Mha) of central Brazil is occupied by a savanna biome known as the Cerrado. Annual rainfall in this region varies from 1200 to 2000 mm, although there is a long (∼5 month) dry season with almost no rain. This region is regarded by Brazilians as their agricultural frontier and there is a steady growth in the area dedicated to permanent cropping in the region, which today is estimated to occupy 14 Mha. Owing to the dearth of long-term experiments, the impact of continuous cropping on soil carbon stocks remains unclear. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of different tillage systems (zero till (ZT) and conventional tillage (CT)) on the change in soil carbon stocks over a 20-year period of the same crop sequence compared to that under a neighbouring area of native vegetation (NV). Only approximately 10 Mg ha−1 of soil carbon in the 0–100 cm depth interval was lost under continuous ZT. However, under CT systems losses were greater (up to 30 Mg C ha−1) when the mouldboard plough was used and/or tillage was performed twice a year. We did not have access to instrumentation to accurately assess soil charcoal but the C/N data and peroxide and dichromate oxidative techniques suggested that ∼40% of soil C was in this form. The 13C natural abundance of soil profiles indicated that residues of crops (maize) and the spontaneous annual fallow of Brachiaria spp. resulted in integration of significant C4 residues to a depth of at least 40 cm. It would appear that zero tillage, which is already widely adopted in the Cerrado region of Brazil, will have only a small negative long-term impact on soil C stocks, but ploughing, especially more than once a year, will lead to considerably larger soil C losses.