Year-round crop diversification influence on microbial communities in a silt loam

To explore outcomes of crop diversification for soil microbes and soil functioning, we conducted a four-year field experiment in western Tennessee, United States. The experiment included a factorial treatment design between two crop diversification strategies, cover cropping and row crop rotation. Combined treatments ranged from simplified continuous cropping of corn or soybean with winter fallow, to a diversified three-crop annual rotation (corn-cotton-soybean) with a five-species mixture winter cover crop. We used amplicon sequencing to characterize fungal and bacterial communities and soil health-related properties in soils collected three times per year.