Mechanical and Biological Soil Decompaction for No-Tillage Maize Production
, André LuÃs Benaventana Leal Júnior 1, Antônio Carlos Barreto 1, Fabio Janoni Carvalho 1, Renato Lara de Assis 2, Arcângelo Loss 3, Ernane Miranda Lemes 4 and Dinamar Márcia da Silva Vieira 4Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Review Comments for Agronomy manuscript agronomy-1901752, entitled "Maize yield and soil physical attributes after soil compaction alleviation by tillage with cover crops", submitted by Torres et al. (2022).
General Comments
Soil compaction induced by the heavy machinery operations is a common problem of the no-till systems, which could negatively impact the development of the plants (e.g., maize). The authors of the manuscript dealt with the topic of maize yield and soil physical attributes after soil compaction alleviation by tillage with cover crops. This manuscript is easy to follow and generally the quality of manuscript is good in terms of writing, statistics, data presentation and discussion of the obtained results. In this case, I recommend the article for publication in the journal Agronomy after addressing the following issues.
Specific Comments
Page 1 Line 12 Please make soil sampling depth specific.
Page 1 Line 15-16 and 17-18 Please quantity those effects reported in these two sentences.
Page 1 Line 21 Please add a statement of implications/ramifications of results to end the abstract. What do the results mean in a larger context?
Page 1 Line 26-27 Please add the relevant references.
Page 1 Line 27 and 41, Page 2 Line 12 and 15 Please note the correct way to cite literature. Usually, it is author + et al. + year. For example, the cited article 8 should be “Loss et al. (2019) emphasizedthat after few years……”. I also notice this irregular citation style throughout the whole text, please correct it carefully.
Page 1 Line 41-43 A recent global meta-analysis (DOI: 10.1002/ldr.4109) also reported that NTS could enhance soil structure due to the stabilization of soil aggregates, I suggest you to cite this article here.
Page 5 Figure 2 and Tables 2-5 I suggest to add the standard deviation or error of four replicates in the figure and tables to make the results of data analyses more clear.
Page 5 Table 1 Please add detailed descriptions on the three-way ANOVA in Statistical analysis section. I suggested you to use MIXED procedure of SAS, with crop season as repeated measures, and crop season, soil decompaction treatment, cover crop, and block as the fixed effect. More detail on this statistical analysis method can be found in the following articles: (1) DOI: 10.1016/j.fcr.2019.107558 and (2) Littell, R.C., Milliken, G.A., Stroup, W.W., Wolfnger, R.D., Schabenberger, O., 2006. SAS For Mixed Models, 2nd ed. SAS Inst., Cary, NC.
Page 8-10 From my side, the Discussion section is relatively comprehensive, I only have two comments on this section. The first one is that the linkage to the proposed hypotheses in the Discussion must be strongly improved. As now, I have not find any reference to hypothesis in the Discussion. The obtained results confirmed the hypothesis of this manuscript? Accordingly, please revise it. The second one is that the authors had better to add a statement of implications/ramifications of results to end the Discussion section. What do the results you obtained mean in a larger context?
Page 10 Line 33 I suggest authors to tell the readers something about significance and/or importance of your study. This would improve the quality of this manuscript.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors,
I have read your manuscript titled "Maize yield and soil physical attributes after soil compaction alleviation by tillage with cover crops" and I found it scientifically interesting.
It is a widely studied topic in most maize porducing region, the important part is the 3-year type of the results with adequate research methodology.
Please explain why did you choose to harvest 100 days after the sowing instead of harvesting at physiological maturity, when the dry matter accumulation ends?
Please re-read all the manuscript, it contains several typos and misspellings, a native English corrector should check the paper.
Regards
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Editor and Authors:
After careful revision by the authors of the manuscript, I recommend that the article can be published in Agronomy. The editing of the manuscript in relation to my queries is fully satisfactory.
All the best.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
