Evaluation of sunn hemp productivity after wheat under no tillage conditions

Enhancing the multitasking of traditional agriculture is a key strategy to fulfil the Horizon 2020 targets. Sunn hemp, cultivated as an energy crop within the traditional rotations gap, represents an ambitious challenge for the coexistence of food and non-food crops without competition. The short time available for soil tillage between consecutive crops in rotation could be extended through quicker and more economical seedbed preparation. Three soil management practices were compared in this study: no-(NT), minimum (MT) and conventional (CT) tillage. Even though the non-statistical differences in the average dry biomass, the NT treatment resulted 27% higher than the CT. Furthermore crop yield and architectural components of the plants such as emergence rate, number of plants, canopy cover, and plant height increased by 25%, 33%, 32%, and 20%, respectively under NT conditions in comparison to CT. Moreover branching rate was reduced by two to six times. Besides generating a better plant performance since the emergence stage, the better biometric canopy characteristic of the NT treatment offer improved agronomic harvest characteristic without a yield reduction.