Abstract
Legumes managed as green manures provide a good alternative to the use of commercial N-fertilizer for non-legume crop production. An accurate method for predicting the N supplying potential of legumes must be available in order to select the most promising legumes. A field procedure based on the periodic measurement of inorganic nitrogen accumulated in bare fallow soil after the incorporation of legumes was tested on three field experiments carried out from 1983 to 1986 on Oxisols of the Cerrado Region of Central Brazil. The response of maize (Zea mays L.) to incorporated legumes was estimated from companion cropped plots. The amount of inorganic nitrogen accumulated in fallow soil was highly correlated to both nitrogen content in the aboveground dry matter of maize and nitrogen content in the aboveground dry matter plus the residual inorganic nitrogen in the cropped plots in all three experiments. The results showed that the nitrogen supplying potential of legumes for a succeeding non-legume crop may be estimated by the accumulation of inorganic nitrogen in bare fallow soil after the incorporation of the legumes.
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Bowen, W.T., Quintana, J.O., Pereira, J. et al. Screening legume green manures as nitrogen sources to succeeding non-legume crops. Plant Soil 111, 75–80 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02182039
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02182039