Subsurface drip irrigation offers many advantages for management of water and nutrients, but itseffectiveness may be limited by weather or soil conditions. Solving soil problems, such as compaction, in subsurface dripirrigation systems is understandably difficult using deep tillage. We hypothesized that the need for deep tillage inconservation tillage systems may be reduced if the compacted soil layers are kept moist enough for root growth. A twoyearexperiment that included wheat, soybean, and cotton under no-tillage culture was conducted with subsurface dripirrigation. The irrigation system had been used for five years before this experiment and provided two irrigation drip linespacings (1 m and 2 m) and three irrigation amounts (6, 9, and 12 mm/application). Irrigated soybean yields were greaterthan rainfed in one of the two years. No differences in yield occurred among irrigation drip line spacing or irrigationamounts. Also, neither cotton nor wheat yields were increased by irrigation. Observations during the growing seasons,cotton root observations after harvest, and soil strength measurements during the spring indicate that considerable soilcompaction occurred at very shallow soil depths (< 5 cm) and restricted root growth. This compaction probably limitedthe efficacy of subsurface drip irrigation, which was located at the 30-cm depth. Based on these results, it appears thatstrategies must be developed to reduce soil strength to obtain optimum no-tillage crop production with subsurface dripirrigation on these soils.
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Camp et al. (1999) studied this question.