Fig 1.
Monthly (October 2014 –June 2015) and 30-year cumulated precipitation, and monthly average, maximum and minimum and 30-year average temperature recorded by the meteorological station at FieldLab in Papiano (Perugia, Italy) (42°57'22"N 12°22'32"E).
Fig 2.
Monthly (October 2015 –June 2016) and 30-year cumulated precipitation, and monthly average, maximum and minimum and 30-year average temperature recorded by the meteorological station at FieldLab in Papiano (Perugia, Italy) (42°57'22"N 12°22'32"E).
Fig 3.
The Fleco heavy roller.
Fig 4.
The Clemens Eco-roll with the Hexagon frame and water container.
Fig 5.
The Rodale Institute design-based roller crimper front-mounted at the New Holland TL100 tractor.
Table 1.
Roller crimpers main characteristics.
Fig 6.
The flaming machine conducting cover crop mixture termination after the roller crimper operation.
Fig 7.
Percentage of green cover as affected by time (days after termination) and by the interaction between the type of roller (Fleco, Clemens and Rodale) and the flaming factor (if applied or not), in 2015 and 2016 growing seasons.
All the data points and the model-based standard errors are reported, respectively, in the top and bottom graphs. The parameters of the curves (Eq 1) are reported in Table 2. Degrees of freedom: 96. The percentage of green cover before the termination was 100% in all plots.
Table 2.
Parameters and absolute effective times (i.e. response level refers to 100% of green cover observed before the cover crop termination) of the log-logistic function (Eq 1) modelling the green cover (%) as affected by time (days after termination) and by the interaction between the type of roller (Fleco, Clemens and Rodale) and the flaming factor (if applied or not), in 2015 and 2016 growing seasons.
The nonlinear regression is plotted in Fig 7.
Table 3.
Roller crimpers and flaming machines performance and costs estimation.
All machines were used coupled with a New Holland TL100 tractor.
Table 4.
Mean height and dry biomass, and standard errors of the cover crop mixture in 2015 and 2016 growing seasons.