Nutrient Cycling by Cover Crops in Vegetable Growing under Conservation Agriculture

Nutrient cycling for crop production is desired to reduce environment impact, enhance nutrients use
efficiency and reduce cost production. Several agriculture techniques are available to support this
possibility for grower and so give the sustainable production driving for the better nutrient using.
Conservation Agriculture is a current system for crop production that provide this possibility and it is
based in three agronomic principles that are minimum disturbance of soil or no-tillage for crop
establishment, permanent residue on soil surface and crop rotation. In this context, cover crops is use
as crop rotation in vegetable production and this possibilities the nutrients cycling, straw production to
protect soil surface and improving in soil fertility, among another benefits to agricultural environment.
Because your vigorous root growth they achieve nutrients that were being lost by leaching in the soil
profile e come back to their shoot recycling nutrients into the system. After, nutrients will be
mineralized and so available to the soil solution and crop nutrition. Many horticulturists around the
world have been using successfully cover crops as crop rotation to get sustainable in their production
and here in this work we approach some results that support rational using of cover crops for
recycling nutrients in horticultural crops in the context of Conservation Agriculture. So we certified this
efficient function of cover crops to straw production and nutrient recycling in some crop like tomato,
broccolis and watermelon to get high yield with reduced environmental impacts and improvement of
soil fertility.