The aim of soil tillage is to maintain a favourable and stable soil structure, and to offer suitable conditions for crop installation and growth (ASIAT, 1989). This objective is reached by a reduction of soil disturbance and by no-till techniques, which limit the loss of soil fertility particularly in field cropping systems.
Here we are interested in the influence of conservation tillage on plant nutrition, weed control and crop performance. These different factors and the evolution of soil properties are studied, among others, in a long term experiment comparing conventional tillage with three treatments without ploughing.