Effects of soil tillage systems on the water use and on common bean yield

The objective of this work was to compare water use efficiency and yield of two common bean cultivars with different plant architectures under no-tillage system, using two amounts of straw in relation to other soil tillage systems. The experiment was carried out during four years on a Dark Red Latosol, in Santo Antonio de Goias, GO, Brazil. The experimental design was a splitplot strip block with four replications. The A strips, parallel to a sprinkler line source, consisted of five irrigation levels. The four year-average water amounts applied to each strip were: 399.8, 307.0, 216.8, 128.0, and 54.0 mm. The B strips, across to sprinkler line source, consisted of five soil tillage systems: no-tillage, no-tillage plus mulch, harrowing, moldboard ploughing, and chisel ploughing. Cultivars Safira and Apore were planted in the splitplots. The magnitude of common bean yield response to irrigation levels varied with bean cultivar and soil tillage systems. No-tillage with adequate mulch provided higher water economy than the other soil tillage systems.