Technical and economic options for rotation in an area with crop silage production in Integrated Crop-Livestock System: Physical and chemical soil amendment

Abstract

The search for profitable systems and high productivity has led the producer to adopt a set of measures to enable the sustainable exploitation of the growing area in order to preserve the physical and chemical characteristics of the soil in a production cycle to another. The alternatives that have been shown to be more viable in this sense are the realization of crop rotation and the installation of no-tillage and Integrated Crop-Livestock (ILP). Thus, this research study will be conducted in Cerrado belonging to the Faculty of Engineering/UNESP, Ilha Solteira campus, located in Selvíria-MS. Two consecutive experiments will be conducted in the experimental area for two growing seasons. The first will consist of the sorghum crop consortium with tropical forages and/or pigeon pea in the ILP system in two moments of harvest, in order to silage production and to evaluate the quality and productivity of the remaining fodder for grazing. The second experiment will consist of planting corn and soybeans in the area previously occupied by the consortium sorghum and fodder. In this sense, the project will evaluate: 1) the productive performance of sorghum intercropped with Urochloa brizantha (Marandu grass), Panicum maximum (Mombaça grass) and pigeon pea dwarf in the first cut and regrowth at 90 days; 2) the components of production and forage yield of consortia with sorghum and pigeon pea dwarf in the first cut, the regrowth and winter pasture; 3) the production of corn and soybean crop performance 4) changes in chemical and physical properties of soil in the layer 0 to 0.10 and 0.10 to 0.20 m at the end of each production cycle; 5) the ILPs economic performance under no-tillage during the study period, in order to verify the sustainability and profitability of each system.