Revolutionising Agricultural Sustainability: New 'Furrow Tillage' can Mitigate Short-Term Soil-to-Atmosphere CO₂ Flux and Promote Soil-Plant-Microbe Health.

Authors

Arnab Majumdar, Munish Kumar Upadhyay, Argha Ghosh, Rakesh Biswas, Ioly Kotta Loizou, Martin Buck, Mark Tibbett, Biswajit Giri, Debojyoti Moulick, Manoj Kumar Jaiswal, Tarit Roychowdhury

Published in

Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany). Pages e76645. Jul 17, 2026. Epub Jul 17, 2026.

Abstract

Global agricultural carbon loss demands refined tillage practices. This study evaluates a hybrid furrow tillage field (FTF) approach that combines the bed geometry of conservation tillage with controlled, localised disturbance of conventional tillage. Distinct from strip-tillage and permanent-bed planting, FTF is designed for puddled, lowland rice systems, featuring a continuously water-filled furrow and an alternately wet-dry mid-bed. A two-year, twelve-site field trial across the Gangetic deltaic plain of West Bengal, India, assessed FTF through agronomy, geochemistry, crop physiology, and molecular microbiology, and presented all CO₂-flux and labile-carbon results as short-term responses. FTF produced CO₂ efflux comparable to no-tillage (3.94-4.38 vs. 2.43-2.84 g C m^{- 2} d^{- 1}) while sustaining nutrient bioavailability close to conventional deep tillage (6.29-7.11 g C m^{- 2} d^{- 1}), demonstrating that hybrid bed-and-furrow geometry can decouple short-term CO₂ flux from nutrient-mineralisation benefits. Microbial diversity and gene-ontology profiles indicate active microbial interactions with reduced soil-to-atmosphere CO₂ transfer. Molecular modelling identifies AmtB and HypC-HypD as candidate CO₂-handling routes; mid-bed physical properties independently contribute to flux reduction. Long-term SOC stability requires multi-year, multi-soil-order validation with isotopic partitioning. The study integrates CO₂ flux chambers, Kriging interpolation, elemental bioavailability analysis, plant ultrastructural observation, metagenomics, and molecular modelling.

PMID:
42467857
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 18 Jul 2026.

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