Rice Waste and Tillage Management in Guilan Rice Paddy Fields: An Essential Approach to Sustainable Agricultural Management

One of the major contributors to air pollution, soil environmental degradations and health risks in paddy fields is the production of high volumes of rice growing activities’ wastes. Poorly managed rice husk and straw (such as burning) can be problematic since they threaten rice -based cropping system and farmers’ economy. One promising approach to decrease their negative effects is to use alternative managerial practices to guaranty both food security and sustainable agriculture and to address waste management issues. Currently, the burning rice wastes burning and off season’s tillage are two hot topics that is of interest to numerous agricultural researchers. The main purpose of this study was to explore the effects of rice residues burning on a number of crucial paddy soil chemical and physical characters, rice yield and yield component, rice pests, diseases, and common weeds populations. The current one -year field experiment was carried out in five factors factorial arrangement in a randomized complete block design with three replications. The treatments were tillage methods at three levels (non-plowing, autumn plowing, and winter plowing), and crop residues’ management at two levels (residues burning and residues conservation). The chemical (Total N, Zn content and OC %) and physical (infiltration rate) properties of paddy soil were significantly affected by residual management (p <0.05), except bulk density. The initial soil organic carbon percentage (2.18%) and consequently initial infiltration rate (2.04) increased at the conservative management of the residues in combination with plowing by around 0.51 percent, 2.69 and 2.81, respectively. Furthermore, the 1000 grains weight and filled grains weight were increased by abovementioned treatments by around 8 and 9percent, respectively. The rate of emergence of rice stem borer was negatively affected by winter and autumn plowing more than 4 times, with non- significant difference between winter and autumn plowing.  The applied treatments had not any significant effect on studied rice weed populations, except weed 1 that tillage management caused a decrease about 2 times in its population. The applied treatments (alone and/or in combination) not only can certainly contribute to the reduction of rice weed, pest and disease populations but also strongly recommend to improve some important soil physical and chemical properties.