Inclusión de cultivos de cobertura en monocultivo de soja:

un paso hacia el mejor aprovechamiento del agua pluvial

Abstract

Cover crops (CC) improve the management of the hydric resources, because it determine the pick up, runoff,
infiltration and evaporation rates. The objective of this work was to study how winter CC affect soil water
availability and how this can be altered by the moment of death of CC. In Sub-humid region it were seeding
three winter CC and this were death in three moment, comparing the effect with traditional fallow. The CC
reduce significantly soil water, but this it caused the soil surface protection against spring rains by producing
biomass. In general, soil water availability for soybean seeding was not affected. Traditional fallow lost the
water accumulated from autumn rains by direct evaporation and it was less efficient to catch sprig rains,
because of this soil water at soybean seeding was until 30 mm less that observed for CC.