Revolutionising Agricultural Sustainability: New ‘Furrow Tillage’ can Mitigate Short‐Term Soil‐to‐Atmosphere CO ₂ Flux and Promote Soil‐Plant‐Microbe Health

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 CO 2 ‐flux and labile‐carbon results as short‐term responses. FTF produced CO 2 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 CO 2 flux from nutrient‐mineralisation benefits. Microbial diversity and gene‐ontology profiles indicate active microbial interactions with reduced soil‐to‐atmosphere CO 2 transfer. Molecular modelling identifies AmtB and HypC–HypD as candidate CO 2 ‐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 CO 2 flux chambers, Kriging interpolation, elemental bioavailability analysis, plant ultrastructural observation, metagenomics, and molecular modelling.