Conservation Tillage, Soil Organic Carbon Sequestration, and Microbial Community Dynamics in Temperate Cereal Cropping Systems

Soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration in agricultural systems represents a dual-benefit strategy that simultaneously improves soil health and contributes to climate change mitigation. Tillage intensity is the most tractable management lever for influencing SOC dynamics in arable cropping systems, as conventional tillage mechanically disrupts soil aggregates, accelerates organic matter decomposition, and destroys the macropore networks and biological communities that mediate carbon stabilisation. This five-year multi-site randomised block trial examined the effects of conventional tillage (CT), minimum tillage (MT), and no-till (NT) on SOC concentration, soil physical properties, microbial biomass, and earthworm populations across eight experimental sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern Germany.Results demonstrate significant treatment effects on all measured soil parameters after five years, with no-till plots showing 65 percent higher SOC (2.34 vs. 1.42% in CT), 130 percent higher water infiltration (42.3 vs. 18.4 mm/hr), 73 percent higher microbial biomass carbon, and 124 percent higher earthworm density. Crop yields under no-till converged toward conventional tillage equivalence by year three, with mean yield penalties of only 4.2 percent in years four and five. Carbon balance modelling indicates that no-till adoption across the 4.8 million hectares of cereal cropland in northwestern Europe could sequester an additional 2.8 to 4.1 Mt CO₂-equivalent per year.