We need to radically transform our food and agriculture system to stay within the planetary boundaries. Sustainably increasing plant production while substantially reducing animal production unveils the need of alternatives to both chemical-based conventional and animalbased organic agriculture. In stockless farming systems, legume–grass mixtures provide no direct economic return; therefore, their proportion in crop rotations is often reduced. As a result, stockless farming is often considered challenging in terms of long-term soil fertility and plant nutrition, although research on this topic is rare. To address the specific challenges faced by veganic and stockless organic farming, a long-term field experiment was established in 2017 in Hesse, Germany, in which one veganic and two stockless organic farm systems differing in crop rotation, each combined with three fertilization systems, are compared to a mixed farm system with three livestock density levels. All systems also include an unfertilized control treatment, in which legume–grass mixtures are mulched. This experiment provides a unique basis for analyzing the long-term effects of different management and fertilization strategies on soil biogeochemical processes in detail.
Here, we aimed to study the effects of (stockless/veganic) crop rotation and organic fertilization on microbial biomass and enzyme kinetics.
