Soybean cultivation is expanding in Central Europe, with regions such as Northern Germany becoming new frontiers due to rising temperatures and growing interest in protein security and cropping system diversification. Despite promising initial results, there remains a significant knowledge gap regarding the long-term impacts of key management practices such as soil tillage, irrigation, and rotation schemes on soybean performance and ecosystem services (ES) like biological nitrogen fixation (BNF).
This pilot study is embedded in a long-term field experiment (V4) established in 2000 at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), with soybean included since 2018. It aims to provide new insights into how different agronomic strategies affect soybean productivity and ES delivery under Northern European conditions, especially in water-limited environments.
Specific objectives are:
- Publish the relevant management, crop yield and monitoring data in an online data repository
- Study how successive/repeated inoculation affects rhizobial population and nodulation and grain yield in soybean
- Analyse the yield and agronomic performance of soybean under diverse management practices
- Evaluate the influence of soil tillage, irrigation and soybean-inclusive rotations on BNF