However, these negative consequences can be reduced and prevented by diversifying crop rotations to include pulses, forages, grasses, oil seeds, and fall-seeded crops. The benefits of diversified crop rotations married together with conservation tillage can dramatically increase soil productivity while reducing off-farm costs. Low residue crops like peas, mustard, or canola can be rotated with higher residue cereals to reduce the trash loading. Rotating cereals and oilseeds with peas, forages, or underseeding cereals with annual legumes increases the amount of N available to plants in the cropping systems. The residual benefits of N from these crops can be persistent for a number of years depending on which legume was used.
Legumes do well in biologically active soils, and also act to build biologically active soils.
Increasing the amount of available nutrients at depth allows for the continued availability of key nutrients throughout the growing season. Residues from some crops inhibit the growth of other plants either directly, or indirectly from the by-products produced from the microbial decay of the residues. Fall rye, mustard, George Black medic, and sweet clover will inhibit the growth of some weeds in no tillage as well as conventional tillage. The Land Resource Sciences Section at the Lethbridge Research Centre has undertaken a new long-term field experiment, that has been largely funded by farmers, to study the effects of new flexible dryland cropping systems with integrated livestock grazing under conservation tillage on yields, pest and disease populations, soil quality and economics. This study emphasizes a systems approach to agriculture, where the effects of soil management are considered in light of the benefits of improving the soil biological, chemical and physical properties for crop productivity, economic viability, and environmental sustainability.