Nitrate leaching from organic and conventional arable crop farms in the Seine Basin (France)

In the Seine Basin, characterised by intensive arable crops, most of the surface and groundwater is contaminated by nitrate (NO3−). The goal of this study is to investigate nitrogen leaching on commercial arable crop farms in five organic and three conventional systems. In 2012–2013, a total of 37 fields are studied on eight arable crop rotations, for three different soil and climate conditions. Our results show a gradient of soil solution concentrations in function of crops, lower for alfalfa (mean 2.8 mg NO3-N l−1) and higher for crops fertilised after legumes (15 mg NO3-N l−1). Catch crops decrease nitrate soil solution concentrations, below 10 mg NO3-N l−1. For a full rotation, the estimated mean concentrations is lower for organic farming, 12 ± 5 mg NO3-N l−1 than for conventional farming 24 ± 11 mg NO3-N l−1, with however a large range of variability. Overall, organic farming shows lower leaching rates (14–50 kg NO3-N ha−1) than conventional farms (32–77 kg NO3-N ha−1). Taking into account the slightly lower productivity of organic systems, we show that yield-scaled leaching values are also lower for organic (0.2 ± 0.1 kg N kg−1 N year−1) than for conventional systems (0.3 ± 0.1 kg N kg−1 N year−1). Overall, we show that organic farming systems have lower impact than conventional farming on N leaching, although there is still room for progress in both systems in commercial farms.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems

• Publication date

  2014-10-26

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Chemistry, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/s10705-014-9650-9
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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