The invisible subsoil compaction risk under no-till farming
Bibliographic record
Abstract
No-till (NT) is a key component of conservation agriculture aiming at producing crops with minimal soil disturbance. This land management practice offers numerous economic and ecological advantages over conventional tillage as evidenced by its rapid expansion since the 1960s, now practiced on 15% of the global arable land. Nevertheless, various crops exhibit persistent yield losses even decades after transition to NT. Here, we demonstrate that the promise of beneficial and sustainable soil management may be undermined by a gradual and invisible threat of subsoil compaction. We report on a risk of subsoil compaction stemming from the episodic passage of heavy machinery (e.g., harvesters). The threat is of dynamic and asymmetric nature whenever compaction events occur more frequently than the natural rates of soil structure recovery, resulting in a gradual increase in soil degradation. Our analyses show that nearly 40% of global NT lands (0.8 million km 2 ) are under high subsoil compaction risk (primarily in heavily mechanized Canada, United States of America, and Brazil). Awareness and mitigation of subsoil compaction by scaling field operations to soil mechanical limits and adoption of smaller robotic vehicles will contribute to a sustainable and holistic conservation agriculture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".