Globally, declining soil quality due to soil degradation is of great concern, and directly affects soil health and sustainability of natural resources. Thus, conservation agriculture is often advocated with a view to increase food production while conserving natural resources and soil carbon. This special collection on ‘No-till farming’, addresses and critically reviews these important issues and aims to foster awareness of no-till farming and its relationship between soil health, carbon sequestration, GHG emissions, food security and ecosystem services.

Conservation agriculture (CA) practices to manage soil health in a changing climate is needed to meet increasing production demands. CA combined with best management practices showed significantly higher amount of water stable aggregates, aggregate associated carbon and improved economic returns. These results suggest that no-tillage and retention of crop residues have potential for improving soil health and monetary gains.

Globally, Climate Smart agricultural practices (CSAPs) such as zero tillage, crop residue management, crop rotation are quite popular among the farmers. We investigated the influence of CSAPs on soil quality, wheat grain yield and green house gases emission on 70 farms of Climate Smart villages (12) of Karnal district, Haryana, India. We found that CSAPs improve soil quality and wheat yield. Higher soil organic carbon content and lower greenhouse gas emissions were observed under CSAPs.

Soil is indispensable for food production but soil quality is often degraded by intensive cultivation and land degradation. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of seasonal variation on enzyme activity and biological soil quality under conservation agriculture (CA)-based rice–mustard system. The CA-based triple zero till (ZT) practice with retention of three crops residues may be recommended in Indo-Gangetic Plains of India, and may also be applicable to similar agro-ecologies of the tropics and sub-tropics.

Shifting agricultural operations to more sustainable management practices is needed in the face of a changing climate. However, conventional intensive agriculture has degraded the quality of environmental and natural resources worldwide. Farmers in the study region are encouraged to consider minimum tillage during the early years of transition from standard to no tillage systems to avoid rapid decline in soil quality and consequent yield loss.

Conservation agriculture (CA) has the sustainable management of the soil as one of its principles. However, one of the biggest concerns when adopting CA in tropical and subtropical Oxisols is the management of soil acidity in subsurface layers. In this context, no-tillage (NT) presented an advantage over other soil management systems because, in addition to most closely resembling the native vegetation soil, it provided greater average wheat yield over eight crop seasons when associated with superficial liming.

Agricultural intensification has created adverse impacts on soils and crop productivit; e.g. loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, decline in soil organic matter and soil health. Conservation management practices involving diversified cropping systems, no tillage, cover-cropping, and livestock grazing showed potential in improving the soil health by enhancing labile C and N pools. An integrated crop–livestock system (ICLS) is a useful option for maintaining and enhancing sustainability of corn–soybean system, which is the main cropping system in Midwestern USA.

Conventional tillage practices over long period of time have deteriorated soils around the world. Since maintenance of long-term research trials is expensive and laborious, the current study was conducted to compare the crop productivity and soil carbon dynamics under conventional and no tillage management practices. The simulation results suggest that crop yield and soil organic carbon in long-term will be benefitted by no tillage management, as compared to conventional tillage.

Sustainable soil management practices such as crop rotations and cover crops have the potential to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions; however, their performance can vary both temporally and spatially in response to climate variations and soil diversity in the landscape. In this study, we evaluated agricultural model (i.e. DNDC; Denitrification-Decomposition) for extrapolating impacts of management over space and time. The evaluated model will be used in in identifying the best management practices that can mitigate GHG and climate change.

Low precipitation and soil erosion are the two most significant restrictions to agricultural productivity in arid regions. Conservation tillage may offer a good opportunity to mitigate these threats; however, switching from traditional tillage to conservation tillage causes initial challenges such as soil compaction and erosion. Our results indicated that contour tillage is viable option for reducing soil erosion and stabilising or increasing crop yields when switching from traditional tillage to conservation tillage.

Conversion of grasslands to croplands can usually result in the degradation of soils and increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, little is known about the impacts of grassland conversion to recently tilled croplands on soils and GHG fluxes. The grassland conversion could lose soil nitrogen and increase soil compaction, acidity, salts and GHG global warming potential, decrease the diversity of abundant genera of microbiomes, and have an increasing trend in soil CO₂ fluxes over time.

Heat transport within the soil is important for seed germination, microbial activity, and water and nutrient availability. This study investigated if cover crop can influence heat transport parameters within the soil. We found that no-till and cover crop management reduces rapid heat transfer and increases the ability of the soil to resist extreme heat change within the soil. In a more variable climate, cover crops might be able to maintain or improve crop productivity by keeping the soil temperature more stable.

The implementation of no-tillage coupled with legume cover cropping results in high carbon sequestration rates in highly weathered soils of southern Brazil. We show that this effect is observed in the whole-soil profile (100 cm) and is due to the formation of mineral–organic associations through the enrichment in plant and microbial residues, arising from the absence of tillage and the presence of high-quality legume residues.

A long-term field experiment assessed the effect of no-tillage (NT) on soil organic C (SOC) and rice yield insouthern Brazil. NT increased SOC at an annual rate of 0.41 Mg ha⁻¹ compared with conventionally tilled soil. Despite the lower rice yield under NT, a slightly higher yield stability and profitability were observed. Our findings indicated that NT is a C-friendly management system in lowland ecosystems, but its effect on yield stability and profitability of rice crop only occurs in the long term.

The sustainability of the long-term rice-based cropping systems practised in hot sub-humid eco-region regions of India is vulnerable to decline in soil organic carbon, soil erosion, intensive agriculture, and various climatic aberrations. The physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soils under major rice-based cropping systems of the region were integrated to assess their quality. Rice-legume cropping systems were found to be the most sustainable alternative in terms of productivity, economic profitability and soil quality.

Conservation agriculture utilising the principles of zero tillage and crop residue management has emerged as an excellent alternative to conventional tillage-based agriculture. Intensive tillage and crop residue burning possess severe challenges in securing sustainable food production, soil health and environmental safeguard in north-west India. Direct seeding of rice and zero till in wheat with full residue retention improved soil organic carbon and nutrient availability, enhancing crop production of both species.