How a Decade of Different Tillage Intensity Influences Yield Response to Seasonal Weather Variations

ABSTRACT Variability in weather conditions represents a growing challenge to crop yield stability and performance. This long‐term field experiment aimed to evaluate how weather conditions affect arable yields under contrasting cultivation practices: plough‐based tillage (P), minimum tillage (MT), and direct drill (DD), over a 10‐year period. Our results showed that ploughing provided the greatest yield stability in all crops across the seasons. Although DD produced lower yields in the first 4 years, DD can preserve soil moisture, making more efficient use of the available precipitation, resulting in similar or higher yields than plough‐based systems in drier and warmer years. This is especially important as we observed an upward trend in the seasonal maximum temperatures (TMax). For wheat crops, our results showed that yield variability was in part explained by cultivations and temperature variables, with spring wheat being more sensitive to variations in weather conditions in comparison to winter crops. When mean seasonal temperatures were < 12.3°C, spring wheat had lower yields under DD compared to MT and P. For winter wheat, yields were lower when the TMax in February was < 9.9°C, regardless of the cultivation system. This study can conclude that cultivation systems can affect arable yields, but weather conditions can have both a positive and a negative impact on crop yields depending on the tillage systems. Climatic variables measured during different crop growth stages were better predictors of yield variability than those averaged over the entire growing season. These results highlight the importance of crop management for optimising production in response to weather variability.