PHYSICAL SOIL QUALITY UNDER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN SUGARCANE FIELD RENEWAL

ABSTRACT Sugarcane field renewal is usually carried out using conventional soil tillage, followed by sugarcane planting or by soybean cultivation or cover cropping. However, efforts have often been made to reduce the intensive operations involved in conventional soil preparation. The objective of this study was to evaluate the physical quality of the soil under conventional tillage (CT) and no-tillage (NT) systems after a sugarcane harvest cycle, before soil preparation and after four months of cultivation of Crotalaria juncea intercropped with Urochloa ruzizienses cv. Xaraés. This study was conducted in the municipality of Juti, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, on a dystrophic psammitic Red Latosol. A randomized block design was used in a split-plot scheme with thirty replications. The main plots consisted of two soil management systems, and the subplots corresponded to evaluation periods (before and after soil preparation and cover crop cultivation). The assessed attributes were soil bulk density (BD), macroporosity (Ma), microporosity (Mi), and total porosity (TP), as well as soil penetration resistance (PR) and soil moisture (SM). The CT promoted greater reductions in soil bulk density and penetration resistance, as well as increases in total porosity and macroporosity in deeper soil layers, compared to NT, which showed improvements particularly in the surface layer. In areas with no chemical or biological limitations in the soil profile, the adoption of NT combined with the cultivation of Crotalaria juncea intercropped with Urochloa ruzizienses cv. Xaraés, is recommended to improve the physical quality of the soil for sugarcane cultivation.