Intertillage during Natural Farming Rice Paddy Production Negatively Impacted the Microbial Abundances in Soils but Not Diversities

In natural farming rice paddies, intertillage (tillage between rows, during rice growth period) is often performed mainly to remove weeds without the use of chemicals. Also, the intertillage disturbs soil surfaces, potentially impacting the characteristics of soil microbial communities, such as their diversity and abundance. Natural farming systems aim to maintain biodiversity, but it remains unclear whether the intertillage impacts soil microbes in rice paddies. Thus, this study aimed to understand to what extent “five times intertillage” treatment (5T) influences soil bacterial abundance and community structures compared with no tillage (NT), under a natural farming rice paddy system. Soils were sampled at rice proximity, soil surface, and 10 cm depth in a natural farming rice paddy, during the early to late vegetative phase (June to July), in Hokkaido, Japan. The 16S rRNA community structures and abundance were analyzed by next generation sequencing (NGS) and quantitative PCR, respectively. We observed that NT had significantly higher bacterial abundances at the soil surface than 5T. However, there were no clear differences between 5T and NT, regarding the bacterial community structures, including their diversity indices. Instead, the sampling timings markedly impacted the bacterial community structures for the rice proximity and soil surface, showing increasing diversity indices at the late vegetative stage, compared to the early vegetative stage, suggesting the interaction between the crop growth and bacterial communities. In this study, we did not observe the significant difference between the rice yield from NT (2.3 ± 0.7 t·ha⁻¹) and 5T plots (2.7 ± 0.9 t·ha⁻¹); however, the 5T might have negatively impacted soil bacterial abundances but not the community structure of the bacteria.