Application of Conservation Tillage in China: A Method to Improve Climate Resilience

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for an interesting study.

 

In general, I suggest the authors add additional previous well-known studies about the limited potential of conservation tillage for climate change mitigation and food production.    

 

Lines 125-144: The authors reviewed all studies conducted in China, but from lines 152-167, the authors reviewed studies conducted outside of China. What are the authors trying to say here? Similarly, in section 3.4, the authors used the same strategy.

 

Lines 170-183: Conservation tillage might not necessarily lead to less greenhouse gas emissions (see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2015.04.035 and https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2292 )

 

Lines 244-241: I would not agree with this statement. Conservation tillage alone is unlikely to have a significant contribution to stabilizing and increasing food production on a global scale. Various previous studies concluded that conservation tillage needs to be used along with other practices such as cover crops to have meaningful impacts on food production and greenhouse gas emissions.  

 

Lines 374-377: The authors should provide additional information about the fact that conservation tillage might reduce crop yield in many regions. In recent meta-analyses of 74 studies covering 14 countries (Ogle et al., 2012) and of 41 studies (239 comparisons) (van Kessel et al., 2013), researchers found that no-tillage and even reduced tillage reduced crop yield compared to conventional tillage

 

I still believe that consideration tillage has a lot of potential for increasing the resiliency of our food system, but conservation tillage needs to be used along with other practices such as cover crops. Thus, I suggest the authors include some more well-known studies such as Powlson et al., 2014 and Ogle et al., 2012 to give readers a broader view of the potential benefits and downsides of conservation tillage.  

 

 

In addition, I would revise Figure A1 to not include nine-dash lines.  On 12 July 2016, an arbitral tribunal constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) had a “say” about this map. If the authors choose not to revise this map/figure, the authors might choose not to include the figure since this figure provides little information about the main message of this study, but is a disputed map to readers.  

Author Response

Thanks very much for taking your time to review this manuscript. We really appreciate all your comments and suggestions! We hope the limitations of conservation tillage have been fully discussed in our revised manuscript. Please see the attachment to check the specific response.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting work, concerning the impact of climate change on agriculture and thus the threats to food production. The authors referred to the definition of conservation tillage. They discussed the importance of conservation tillage in various regions of the world and in 5 regions in China. They pointed out the benefits of using conservation tillage.

 Which requires at least a small addition:

- the role of proper crop rotation for biodiversity and the amount of plant residues left behind; the authors focused mainly on the role of reduced of tillage and plant residues, and to a lesser extent referring to crop rotation

- many new trends are emerging in the world, often convergent with conservation tillage and conservation agriculture; it is worth referring to, for example, regenerative agriculture, which also emphasizes the importance of crop residues, cover crops and reduced tillage

 Some selected publications that can be used to complement the above issues:

 A. Kassam, T. Friedrich, R. Derpsch and J. Kienzle, « Overview of the Worldwide Spread of Conservation Agriculture », Field Actions Science Reports [Online], Vol. 8 | 2015, Online since 26 September 2015, connection on 21 December 2020. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/3966

 Giller, K.E.; Hijbeek, R.; Andersson, J.A.; Sumberg, J. Regenerative Agriculture: An Agronomic Perspective. Outlook Agric. 2021, 50, 13–25.

 Yang Su , Benoit Gabrielle & David Makowski A global dataset for crop production under conventional tillage and no tillage systems. Scientific Data 8, Article number: 33 (2021)

Author Response

Thank you for reading our manuscript and giving such a positive review. We hope that your comments have all been appropriately responded to. Please see the attachment to check specific responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for a chance to review the manuscript ” Application of Conservation Tillage in China: A Method to Improve Climate Resilience” in which the author analyses the conservation tillage potential role in climate resilience. Although the authors try to highlight the “application of conservation tillage” there are many similar manuscripts on the same topic, so in my opinion, the authors didn’t offer added knowledge and scientific merit to this very important topic. The present article is not well-established because the discussion is not developed and the aims and scopes are not clearly established. In addition to that, the authors have not been successful in managing the very complex and broad topic of tillage. Therefore I would suggest resubmitting the current paper taking into account the following comments and specific recommendations within the manuscript

Strengths

·         The selected topic is highly relevant and can be of interest to a wider scientific audience

·         Author has been successful in articulating the conservation tillage role in climate change mitigation

·         Brings to discussion low representation of conservation tillage in China and worldwide

·         This paper highlighted possible agricultural solutions for improvement of climate resilience

Weaknesses

·         I would suggest for the author to have a clear hypothesis considering the aim of the review paper

·         There should be a clear distinction between conservation tillage/no-till/direct sowing because in the paper everything is considered as conservation tillage but it might not be the same

·         The authors have not presented their own results and some studies in which they gain some experience in conservation tillage

·         The authors frequently repeat some phrases related to climate change (marked in the text)

·         The disadvantages of conservation tillage have not been taken into account (some interaction is missing fertilization, crop rotation etc.)

 

·         The discussion is not developed and looks like a factual report - a current state not a synthesis. 

 

TThe specific comments were provided within the document  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you so much for reading our manuscript and giving us many constructive comments. Your comments in the review report have helped us a lot in improving the quality of our manuscript. Please see the attachment to check the specific responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

After reviewing the resubmitted manuscript and reading the answers to the comments from the initial submission, it can be noted that the authors successfully responded to the reviewer's remarks and significantly improved the work. New references have been included and the discussion section was expanded, significantly improving the scientific merit.

At the same time, some minor errors were identified, the elimination of which can improve the manuscript.

LINE 134: "Figure 1 How Conservation Tillage Enhance Climate Resilience in Agriculture." There is no arable layer in this picture. It looks more like a pasture or permanent cover than arable land.

LINE 190: "....can reduce greenhouse gas to mitigate..." please correct this subtitle and the following text by using the term "gases" because there are several GHG

LINE 217: "Climate change caused a rise in temperature..." the temperature of what. Just to clarify please add the average yearly temperature.

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Thank you so much for your valuable comments. Please see the attachment to check the specific responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf