Evaluation of Energy Efficiency in Conservation Agriculture System in Temperate-cold Climatic Zone of Mashhad

Modern agriculture in the world had positive results for human by increasing of food and Prosperity, but had negative effects on nonrenewable resources. This system is based on more consumption of foreign inputs, chemical fertilizers, water and energy. Where traditional tillage and residue removal practices have been used over of Iran, soil has been lost through erosion while the soil resource has been degraded physically, chemically and biologically. As a result, improved or new varieties of crops (such as wheat) as well as use of other inputs are not able to deliver their potential contribution. The term conservation agriculture removes the emphasis from the tillage component and addresses an enhanced concept of the complete agricultural system; it involves major changes in many aspects of the farm cropping operation. Due to the increasing consumption of energy in the world and the decrease of energy resources, it is important to pay attention to the systems that wasting energy in them be at the least. The aim of project was to evaluate the energy efficiency of the protective system of agricultural under two separate systems of crop rotation in two separate experiment, in agricultural and natural resource research education center (station of Torogh, in Mashhad). The experiment was performance using a split-plot design based on randomized complete block with three replications for five years (during 2011-16 growing seasons). Experiment treatments were various tillage methods in main plots,Conventional Tillage (CT: Plowing + disc + leveling + planting with seeder), Reduced Tillage (RT: heavy disc + planting with seeder) and No Tillage (NT: planting with seed).Residue management in sub plots contain, no residue (R0), Maintaining 30 percent of the plant residue (R1) and Maintaining 60 percent of the plant residue (R2). The first crop rotation was conventional as the same of farmer rotations consist of wheat-corn-wheat-melon-wheat. The second crop rotation was more diverse and closed to sustainable rotation inclusive wheat-rapeseed-wheat-clover-tomato-wheat. Results showed that with energy efficiency for both crop rotations (conventional and sustainable) the contribution of human strength was very low and contribution of water and straw each with 30% had the highest level and machine and fertilizer were in the subsequent stage. In both crop rotations, NT + R0 had the highest level of energy efficiency. In conventional crop rotation, increasing of tillage from NT to CT had decreasing of energy efficiency but increasing of tillage from NT to RT treatments increasing energy efficiency slowly.