Ulrich Köpke

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared intensive, extensified and organic grassland farming in southern Germany by process life cycle assessment, and found that organic farms had clear advantages in the indicators of grassland species, grazing cattle, layout of farmstead and herd management, but indices in these categories showed a wide range and are partly independent of the farming system.

TL;DR: In this paper, the root growth in untilled and tilled soil was investigated in a tilled and an untilled grey brown podzolic loess soil, where the root density was linearly related to penetration resistance.

TL;DR: The key environmental benefits of faba beans are their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen symbiotically under a broad spectrum of environmental conditions and making this renewable resource available to show positive precrop effects in diversified crop rotations as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the role of biopores in the nutrient acquisition from arable subsoils and found that subsoil can contribute to more than two-thirds of the plant nutrition of N, P and K, especially when the topsoil is dry or nutrient depleted.

TL;DR: The results showed that plots which received either prepared or non-prepared FYM had significantly increased soil pH, P and K concentrations, microbial biomass, dehydrogenase activity, decomposition, earthworm cast production and altered earthworm community composition than plots without FYM application.