Revolutionising Agricultural Sustainability: New 'Furrow Tillage' can Mitigate Short-Term Soil-to-Atmosphere CO₂ Flux...

Global agricultural carbon loss demands refined tillage practices. This study evaluates a hybrid furrow tillage field (FTF) approach that combines the bed geometry of conservation tillage with controlled, localised disturbance of conventional tillage. Distinct from strip-tillage and permanent-bed planting, FTF is designed for puddled, lowland rice systems, featuring a continuously water-filled furrow and an alternately wet-dry mid-bed. A two-year, twelve-site field trial across the Gangetic deltaic plain of West Bengal, India, assessed FTF through agronomy, geochemistry, crop physiology, and molecular microbiology, and presented all CO₂-flux and labile-carbon results as short-term responses. FTF produced CO₂ efflux comparable to no-tillage (3.94-4.38 vs. 2.43-2.84 g C m^{- 2} d^{- 1}) while sustaining nutrient bioavailability close to conventional deep tillage (6.29-7.11 g C m^{- 2} d^{- 1}), demonstrating that hybrid bed-and-furrow geometry can decouple short-term CO₂ flux from nutrient-mineralisation benefits. Microbial diversity and gene-ontology profiles indicate active microbial interactions with reduced soil-to-atmosphere CO₂ transfer. Molecular modelling identifies AmtB and HypC-HypD as candidate CO₂-handling routes; mid-bed physical properties independently contribute to flux reduction. Long-term SOC stability requires multi-year, multi-soil-order validation with isotopic partitioning. The study integrates CO₂ flux chambers, Kriging interpolation, elemental bioavailability analysis, plant ultrastructural observation, metagenomics, and molecular modelling.