ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that what water quality benefits are now being obtained with the use of conservation tillage, where potential water quality problems exist, and what might be done to alleviate them. It presents that conservation tillage usually reduces the volume of runoff by an average of about 25 percent, but the degree of reduction is highly variable. Soil incorporation of chemicals by tillage is reduced or eliminated with conservation tillage because of the desire to leave crop residue on the soil surface. Concentrations and losses of soluble nutrients in runoff from areas where fertilizer has been incorporated by moldboard plowing have been found to be the same as for unfertilized areas. Blevins found that after 10 years of continuous corn production under no-till, the surface of a Maury silt loam soil had about twice the organic matter and pH 0.7 units lower than that for conventional tillage.
