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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Agron.

Sec. Plant-Soil Interactions

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fagro.2025.1621756

This article is part of the Research TopicSoil Tillage and Nitrogen Fertilization Methods for Sustainable Productivity of Industrial CropsView all 4 articles

Contribution of maize crop residues and fertilization to nitrogen nutrition of soybean grown under no-tillage system

Provisionally accepted
Isabeli  Pereira BrunoIsabeli Pereira Bruno1*Vinicius  Ide FranziniVinicius Ide Franzini2Takashi  MuraokaTakashi Muraoka3
  • 1Instituto de Desenvolvimento Rural do Paraná (IDR), Curitiba, Brazil
  • 2Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation - Embrapa Uva e Vinho, Bento Gonçalves, Brazil
  • 3Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture, University of São Paulo, Piracicaba, Brazil

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Nitrogen (N) is essential for plant growth and, consequently, a key factor in the productivity and sustainability of agriculture. Soybean and maize require large amounts of N during the growing season. Although soybean primarily relies on biological nitrogen fixation, this source alone does not meet the crop's total N requirements. Maize-soybean rotation is common under no-tillage systems, but the contribution of maize stover and N fertilizer to the subsequent soybean crop had been unclear. This study used a two-season field experiment to quantify N uptake and recovery in maize and the following soybean crop. Maize was fertilized with increasing rates of N-urea, and 15 N tracing was used to assess N dynamics in the shoots of both maize and the subsequent soybean. Most of the N in maize shoot was derived from the soil, with up to 37% originating from fertilizer. In both crops, grains were the primary N sink, and high yields were achieved. In soybean, N uptake from maize stover and residual fertilizer was minimal, with a maximum recovery of 9% in the grain. These findings reveal for the first time the limited short-term contribution of N-urea applied to maize and its stover to soybean nutrition, suggesting that soil N plays an important role in supplying N to the soybean system.

Keywords: crop residues, No-tillage, 15 N, Isotopes, Zea mays, Glycine max

Received: 01 May 2025; Accepted: 22 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Pereira Bruno, Ide Franzini and Muraoka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Isabeli Pereira Bruno, Instituto de Desenvolvimento Rural do Paraná (IDR), Curitiba, Brazil

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