## 2 Materials and Methods
### Agriculture Operations Performed and Machines Employed Within the Technical Itineraries  
During both the growing seasons, in each technical itinerary, a 3 m wide combined cultivator was used before cover crop establishment to perform seedbed preparation at a depth of 15 cm. The machine was equipped with nine rigid tines with \"swing\" tools, four couples of concave and inclined discs arranged in a \"V\", and a packer roll to achieve light compaction and leveling of tilled soil. After this intervention, a rotary harmony was used to perform soil refinement at a working depth of about 12 cm. The rotary harmony was equipped with a packer roller and presented a working width of 2.5 m. Cover crop seeds were hand-broadcast distributed. The seed rate of each cover crop established in the trial is described in [22]. In the RT itineraries, green manure was obtained by shredding and burying the cover crop and/or spontaneous vegetation (in the bare soil system). Cover crop burying was performed with two passes of the abovementioned combined cultivator at a depth of 10 cm. In the NT itineraries, dead mulch was obtained by crimper rolling and flaming cover crops. Therefore, a roller-crimper and a flamer machine were employed. The roller crimper was 1.5 m wide and equipped with flat blades arranged in a tangential pattern. The flamer machine has an effective working width of 2 m, was fed with liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and was equipped with 50 cm wide four-rod burners arranged orthogonally to the forward direction. Two rolling and flaming interventions were performed each year. Tomato planting was performed by a transplanter able to work on one or two rows, modified by the University of Pisa to operate both in tilled and untilted soils [24]. Each transplanter unit was equipped with a smooth disc with a diameter of 30 cm, followed by a rigid tine. However, in this field experiment, the transplanter was equipped with a single working unit adjusted to operate at a depth of 18 cm. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline  & **Reduced-Tillage Management System (RT)** & **No-Till Management System (NT)** \\ \hline Type of cover crop & Cover crop (Squarrose clover (RT-C); Rye (RT-R); Mixture (RT-Mix); No cover crop (RT-NC) 1  & Cover crop (Squarrose clover (NT-C); Rye (NT-R); Mixture (RT-Mix); No cover crop (RT-NC) 1  \\ Cover crop management & Green manure & Dead mulch \\ Transplantant & Transplanting on tilled soil & Transplanting on dead mulch \\ Weed control & Precision hoeing & Shredding \\ Hand weeding & Hand weeding & Hand weeding \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Technical itinerary’s main aspects. Transplanting was carried out at a density of 2.2 plants m\({}^{-2}\) and a planting layout of 1.5 m between rows and 0.3 m within the rows. This planting density was chosen because the farm is managed organically and aims to reduce conditions favorable for the development of fungal diseases. Immediately after the transplant, the irrigation hoses and localized fertigation of the tomato were laid out. The tomato plants were irrigated from transplanting to harvest using a drip irrigation system equipped with drip tape placed at the center of the bed, delivering a flow rate of 3.6 L m\({}^{-1}\) per hour, with irrigation cycles lasting 6 h every 4 days. The same irrigation regime was adopted in the different technical itineraries. In the RT itineraries, weed control in the intra-row area was performed with an intervention of manual weeding each year. In contrast, in the inter-row area, a precision weeder was used twice in the first year and once in the second. The precision weeder's working width was 1.5 m, and it was arranged with working units equipped only with a central gose-foot sweep. In the NT itineraries, hand weeding was performed to control intra-row weeds, while two interventions for shredding were used to control weeds in the inter-row space.