Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Soil Health Management: A Review of Impacts, Benefits and Future Directions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

The manuscript entitle " Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Soil Health Management: A Review of Impacts, Benefits and Future Directions" provide a comprehensive review regarding the subject matter, however found some corrections and suggestions to improve the quality.

Pleas avoid repeated words in the Abstract and other sections.

Section headings should be carefully checked with respect to numbering and the text length for each section (example, section is repeated and found longer). Moreover, some subheadings should be merged in this section.

Thanks

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript entitled “Conservation agriculture for sustainable soil health management: A review of impacts, benefits and future directions” (ref. soilsystems-3751173), authored by F.K. Sadiq, O. Anyebe, F. Tanko, A. Abdulkadir, B.O. Manono, T.A. Matsika, F. Abubakar, and S.K. Bello presents an extensive review of the impacts and benefits of conservation agriculture practices on soil properties, as well as some factors that reduce their adoption.

From my viewpoint, the text is too long and repetitive, as most of the sections in which it is divided repeat information from the previous sections. Moreover, some aspects are slightly described (such as the methodology employed for performing the literature search, for instance). Furthermore, the authors cite a recent review on the subject (from 2022) that has already been published in Soil Systems, so making difficult to assess the novelty of the current work.

 

Specific comments:

Abstract:

Line 19: “Conservation agriculture” appears twice in this line.

Line 27: “improved profitability”, do you mean crop yield or its value?

Line 28: “increased” instead of “greater”.

Line 33: What do you mean by “localized strategies”?

 

Keywords:

Please, remove those words that already appear in the title (“Soil Health” and “conservation agriculture”).

 

Introduction:

Line 48: “increase” instead of “increases”.

Lines 54-55: Only in the topsoil?

Lines 56-57: Why can conservation agriculture not the most appropriate approach under those circumstances?

Line 70: Include “emissions” after “greenhouse gases”.

Line 72: “impacts” instead of “impact”.

Line 88: Remove “paper”.

 

 

Conservation agriculture:

Indicate how you performed the literature search: criteria, number of articles found, etc.

Moreover, this section can be reduced by re-organizing sub-sub-sections into larger sub-sections and reducing the number of examples provided.

Line 118: Also establishing permanent cover crops within tree orchards.

Line 121: “contribute” instead of “contributes”.

Line 122: “regulate” instead of “regulates”.

Line 123: “inhibit” instead of “inhibits”.

Lines 135-136: Not always the case. Some studies haver reported increased bulk density and soil compaction after a long-term adoption of no-till practices.

Line 139: “Peng et al. (2020)” must be cited with numbers.

 

Effects of CA on soil properties:

Lines 174-175: I suggest removing these introductory sentences and get directly to the point.

Lines 186-187: Remove this sentence.

Lines 194-195: This is not true according to the previous sentences.

Lines 198-201: Remove these sentences.

Line 211: Include “reported that” after “have”.

Lines 216-220: Remove this paragraph, it is repetitive.

Line 234: Remove this sentence.

Line 260: Check the superscript in the units.

Lines 262-264: Remove this sentence.

Line 272: “pH” instead of “PH”.

Lines 277-283: This contradicts the previous sentence.

Line 287: “Another study [68] revealed” instead of “In another study by Nunes, et al. [68] revealed”.

Lines 296-297: Remove this sentence.

Lines 299-303: This is too verbose and can be reduced.

Lines 309-311: This can or cannot be true according to the previous sentence.

Lines 314-319: This repeats previous paragraphs.

Line 357: “enhance” instead “enhances”.

Line 367: Re-phrase the title of this sub-section to “Mitigating climate change and greenhouse gas emissions”.

Line 384: “microbes compared with conventional” instead of “microbes than conventional”.

Lines 385-387: This sentence is redundant with the former sentence.

Line 397: Remove “Further”.

Line 403: Include “a” before “healthy soil”.

Line 405: “CA” instead of “conservation agriculture”.

Line 406: “carbon” instead of “Carbon”.

Line 416: “gas emissions from soil” instead of “gases emission from soil”.

Table 1: In the title, use “conservation agriculture” instead of “CA”. In the table, you can use “Effect” instead of “Effect of CA”.

 

Potential benefits of CA for promoting soil health:

Lines 421-428: This is a summary of what was said in the previous sections.

Lines 436-438: Remove this sentence.

Lines 484-485: Remove this sentence.

Line 487: “reduction of soil pH” instead of “reduction soil pH”.

Lines 504-505: “(He et al., 2019)”, this citation should be a number.

Lines 509-510: This sentence is incomplete.

Lines 531-538: Already stated several times in the manuscript.

Figure 1: Check this figure as the arrows are positioned quite awkwardly, pointing in ways they should not.

Line 540: Use “conservation agriculture” instead of “CA”.

 

Future directions and technological innovations in CA:

The first sub-section of this section, the one referred to precision agriculture and digital tools only tackle the surface of the topic. No mention on the costs of these technologies and the difficulties that farmers encounter when using them.

Line 551: “GPS” and “GIS” have never been defined.

Line 554: “enable farmers to observe”, not true. Observation is made through sensors, but not through machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Line 562: “ICT” has never been defined.

Line 564: “AI” has never been defined.

Line 569: “conservation mapping”, what do you mean?

Lines 581-591: This is not sufficiently described.

Line 611: “GSM” has never been defined.

Lines 616-619: Already stated several times.

Lines 661-663: This sentence is confusing. Please, re-phrase it.

Lines 664-671: Very good paragraph. Why is this not discussed for precision agriculture?

Lines 683-686: “Rhizobium”, “Azospirillum” and “Azotobacter” should be written in italics.

Line 696: “Bacillus” should be written in italics.

Line 700: “Bacillus thuringiensis” should be written in italics.

Lines 704-710: Is this needed?

Lines 716-719: This is repetitive.

Line 722: “carbon” instead of “carbo”.

Line 724: “nutrients” instead of “them”.

Lines 729-735: Repetition of what is said in this section.

Table 2: “Rhizobium” and “Azospirillum” should be written in italics.

 

Socioeconomic and policy considerations for CA adoption:

Line 747: Include “their” before “adoption”.

Line 750: What do you mean by “reduce information costs”?

Line 753: Unclear sentence. Please, re-phrase it.

Line 763: “perverse incentives”? Should it be “perverse consequences”?

Lines 800-804: This is not only the case for conservation agriculture, but also for conventional agriculure.

Lines 811-812: Use “CA” instead of “Conservation Agriculture (CA)”.

Figure 2: This figure does not add anything to the text. I suggest removing it.

 

Areas for further research and innovation:

This section should be number 7 instead of number 3.

Line 824: “in order to” instead of “This will”.

Lines 829-834: OK, but this does not say anything.

Lines 837-846: It seems that this has already been previously stated in the manuscript.

Lines 846-849: This seems to be unrelated to the rest of the paragraph.

Lines 854-859: This should be a separate paragraph.

Lines 864-867: This seems to be not related to the previous part of the paragraph.

 

Conclusions:

Lines 869-878: Since this has been already stated, I suggest summarizing this paragraph by removing the examples of physical, chemical and biological soil properties that are provided.

References:

Lines 912-914: This is another review that seems to be very similar to the current manuscript. What is the point of repeating? I mean, what is new in the current manuscript when compared to that of Cárceles Rodríguez et al. (2022)?

Lines 938-939: This reference is incomplete. Please, check it and correct it.

Line 950: “Pleurotus ostreatus” should be written in italics.

Line 1074: “Glycine max” should be written in italics.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title:   Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Soil Health Management: A Review of Impacts, Benefits and Future Directions

Title: Title is the true representative of entire work.

Abstract: Abstract has been written concisely and it representing the entire results. Please delete the repeated sentence already indicted in manuscript.

Keywords: Keywords has been nicely mentioned. But it is very lengthy, please try to reduce it.

Introduction: Introduction part is clear and indicated the importance and review of previous work.

Results:  The reviewed data on various parameters have been reported in the form of tables/ figures. Interpretation of the data has been done as per set standard.

Conclusion: It is quite lengthy, please reduce it.

References: The references are mostly relevant and include well-regarded sources.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

            The revised version of the manuscript entitled “Conservation agriculture for sustainable soil health management: A review of impacts, benefits and future directions” (ref. soilsystems-3751173v2) represents a considerable improvement over the original submission. I appreciate the effort that the authors have taken in considering my comments and suggestions.

            The text has been shortened by removing redundant information, as I suggested. In addition, the authors have highlighted the main novelty of their work against previously published reviews.

 

Specific comments:

Introduction:

Lines 99-100: This sentence is confusing. Please, re-phrase it.

Lines 117-123: I do not think that this paragraph belongs to the Introduction. It seems more like a closing remark.

 

Conservation agriculture:

Lines 206-207: Use “its" instead of “their”.

Line 219: I would say “bulk density is a proxy of soil compaction" instead of “bulk density reflects the soil’s compaction”.

 

Effects of CA on soil properties:

Line 312: “An example occurs in no-till systems" instead of "Example is in no-till systems”.

Line 328: Include “(CEC)” in the title of this sub-section.

Line 333: “so does CEC” instead of "so do CEC".

Line 334: I would remove “Increasing it makes the soil’s overall capacity stronger".

 

Future directions and technological innovations in CA:

Line 630: It should be “(iii) monitoring fields”.

Line 720: “can ensure they are suited" instead of "can ensure it is suited".

 

Abbreviations:

AI should be Artificial Intelligence and not Information Technology.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf