the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 26 Sep 2025
No-tillage with Stubble Mulching Enhances Soil Physical Properties and Reduces Soil Penetration Resistance: A Comparative Study in Mollisol Region of Northeast China
Abstract. The mollisol region of Northeast China constitutes a critical grain production base. However, prolonged intensive farming has disrupted native soil structures, driving soil degradation and generating excessive crop residues that constrain sustainable agricultural development. To address these challenges, a field experiment evaluated four mechanized tillage-sowing practices: Plow Tillage with Precise Sowing (PTS), Rotary Tillage with Precise Sowing (RTS), No-Tillage Sowing (NTS), and No-Tillage with Stubble Mulching and Sowing (NTMS). This study systematically assessed the impacts of these practices on soil compaction through analysis of soil penetration resistance (SPR), while further examining their effects on soil water content (SWC) and soil bulk density (SBD). Results demonstrated that NTMS significantly increased SWC, whereas NTS resulted in higher SBD and SPR than other practices. Both PTS and RTS improved SWC relative to NTS and reduced SBD more effectively than NTS or NTMS. Across all practices, SPR exhibited consistent trends during the soybean growth cycle, peaking at the podding stage. NTMS outperformed alternative practices by optimizing soil physical properties, thereby enhancing soil quality and slowing degradation processes in the black soil. Collectively, NTMS implemented within a maize-soybean rotation system offers a viable solution to address maize straw surplus and soil degradation in Northeast China's mollisol region.
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Status: open (until 16 Nov 2025)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3174', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Oct 2025 reply
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-3174', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Oct 2025
reply
The manuscript entitled “No-tillage with Stubble Mulching Enhances Soil Physical Properties and Reduces Soil Penetration Resistance: A Comparative Study in Mollisol Region of Northeast China” compared the soil physical properties (soil water content, bulk density, penetration resistance) under different tillage systems including Plow Tillage with Precise Sowing (PTS), Rotary Tillage with Precise Sowing (RTS), No-Tillage Sowing (NTS), and No-Tillage with Stubble Mulching and Sowing (NTMS). The overall experimental design is appropriate, and the data analysis is reasonable, which can backup the conclusions. However, this research shows limited originality, and the data analysis does not go deeper enough to reveal the mechanisms of tillage treatment on changing the soil physical properties. Additionally, the structure of results and discussion is not well written, which needs to be further revised.
The main comments are as follows:
(1) The novelty of the study is not enough. The study only simply compared the soil parameters eg., water content, bulk density, and penetration resistance under different tillage systems. There parameters are very basic and have been reported in many previous studies. In the black soil region, no tillage (or conservation tillage) with combination of crop residual return has been adopted for a long period of time. The earliest experiments starts from 1990s, and was entered large scales promotion after 2000-2015. During this periods, there are lots of studies compare the soil physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil after the adoption of no tillage (Wang et al., 2007; He et al., 2010; Huang et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2018; Chen et al., 2021;). The effects of conservation tillage on enhancing soil water content and reducing penetration resistance has been recorded., In this study, these references were rarely mentioned in the introduction part. Besides, compared to these studies, the author must address what’s new in this study? The compared soil parameters are very basic mechanical properties, which could be repetition of previous findings. Then if the novelty exists in the design of tillage systems, then author should pointed out why these four tillage systems in this study were different from others.
(2) The deeper mechanism of No-Tillage with Stubble Mulching and Sowing (NTMS) on changes soil properties is not well clarified. The study only “compared” different dataset from different tillage systems without further analyzing the connection among different soil parameters. In the results, there are only the comparison of the bulk density, water content, penetration resistance listed and compare. I think the author can go further to analyze correlation among different parameters accordingly, and find out which factors could be explained as the main factor reducing bulk density or penetration resistance.
For example, if the author want to explain that under NTMS, the penetration resistance was reduced. This could be explained by “Under NTMS, the residue recover on soil surface decreased water evaporation, resulting in a higher water content which potentially decreased soil penetration resistance (give the relationship between water content and penetration resistance from your study to back up your findings).” However, in the manuscript the reason was “line 428-433: This is likely because the straw cover influenced soil structure and the soil environment. Research by Castioni also indicated that maintaining crop residues on the soil surface helps protect soil physical quality (Castioni et al., 2019), reducing wheel pressure on the soil, which in turn decreases soil bulk density and SPR (Reichert et al., 2016). Over time, SPR in the NTMS practice gradually increased and was higher than in the other practices during the podding stage.” These reasons are possible, but there is nothing related with your results. They could be postulations, and most of them are findings from other studies who had used different parameters compared to your study. You must use the data analysis from your study to back up your findings.
(3) The writing should be well organized, especially in Results and Discussion. There are subtitles in every heading level 3 of the results parts. For comparison of one soil water content, the author used 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 to compared different tillage systems in same depths and different depths, respectively. In every heading level 3, the data was described with four subtitle NTMS, NTS, PTS, RTS. This will make the results parts tidy with many repetitions. I recommend to shorten these part and reorganize the results into two para (or even three para) within one title “3.1 The temporal and spatial variations of soil water content under contrasting tillage systems.” Please remember that you don’t need to present every details in result part, just give your key findings. The similar changes should also be made in other part of results and discussion.
In the discussion, the author must discuss the findings based on the data analysis from your own studies. The author should compare the data with other studies and analysis the mechanism or explain it. Do not discuss the irrelevant content. Additionally, the discussion could be improved if less postulate words were used such as “likely”, “This could be”, etc.
(4) The data in Figure 4 and Figure 6 are not correlated. For example, in the Figure 6, the SPR are post-sowing < Emergency stage < Podding stage < Maturity stage, but in Figure 4 the order seems to be Post-sowing < Emergence
The minor comments are list below:
L16-20: is the sowing system in NTS and NTMS also precise sowing?
L70: …Significant SPR effects… SPR is an indicator, and the use of SPR effect is not accurate, maybe “compaction effect”
L71:Tillage practices effectively alleviate surface soil compaction…
L75: The objective of this study is not clear. In objective one, what is “evaluating four tillage practices” mean? Please make it concrete. The objective two: Employ SPR as a primary indicator to assess tillage effects on compaction, while examining impacts on SWC and SBD. Does this mean study the effect of PR on SWC and SBD? Please check it again.
L84: cand 28.9% clay
L92: Do you have the soil organic matter of four tillage treatments? Add more details about agricultural machinery information, such as the weight of tractor, etc.
L100-101: “With each plot, soil sample were taken from four depths (5, 15, 25, and 35 cm).” Cutting ring methods (or oven-dry) is for bulk density measurement. What is the size and volume of iron ring for sampling?
Figure 2 Please show the direction of the plot.
L108: aluminum dish dry method is not a standard method. It was oven-dry method? Or ?
Line 115: The equation 2 is not right based on the sample measurement of this study. The sample was taken from iron ring, so the SBD (g cm-3)=(Mass of dry soil with iron-Mass of iron ring)/Volume of iron ring. Please different letters with equation 1.
Line 123: Give the unit of SPR
L 126 Statistical analysis part is missing
Section 3.1: Try to make this part shorten and clear. Avoid to use subtitles such as Post sowing stage, emergence stages, etc.
Figure 3: the words and numbers in the figure are too small to read. Adjust them into larger size.
Figure 4: The words and numbers in the figure are too small to recognize
Figure 5: In the Figure 5, the maximum penetration resistance during all growing stages is 5 MPa, but why in this figure 6 it was 8 or even 10 MPa? Please carefully check it. At which point that the penetration was measured? It is surprising that all treatment showed so obvious difference of SPR on 0-80 cm layer. Given the water content:20-25% (Figure 3), SBD : 1.35-1.5 g cm-3 (Figure 4), the SPR at Maturity stage are 4 and even 5 times higher than post-swing stage on the whole profile.
References
Zhang, Y., Li, X., Gregorich, E. G., McLaughlin, N. B., Zhang, X., Guo, Y., ... & Sun, B. (2018). No-tillage with continuous maize cropping enhances soil aggregation and organic carbon storage in Northeast China. Geoderma, 330, 204-211.
He, J., Li, H., Kuhn, N. J., Wang, Q., & Zhang, X. (2010). Effect of ridge tillage, no-tillage, and conventional tillage on soil temperature, water use, and crop performance in cold and semi-arid areas in Northeast China. Soil Research, 48(8), 737-744.
Chen, H., Liu, Y., Lü, L., Yuan, L., Jia, J., Chen, X., ... & Chi, G. (2021). Effects of no-tillage and stover mulching on the transformation and utilization of chemical fertilizer N in Northeast China. Soil and Tillage Research, 213, 105131.
Huang, S., Yan-Ni, S. U. N., Wen-Yi, R. U. I., Wu-Ren, L. I. U., & Zhang, W. J. (2010). Long-term effect of no-tillage on soil organic carbon fractions in a continuous maize cropping system of Northeast China. Pedosphere, 20(3), 285-292.
Wang, X. B., Cai, D. X., Hoogmoed, W. B., Oenema, O., & Perdok, U. D. (2007). Developments in conservation tillage in rainfed regions of North China. Soil and Tillage Research, 93(2), 239-250.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-3174-RC2
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