| dc.description.abstract | Food security issues are strongly associated to the availability of food and land that affecting plant growth and production. Intensive tillage in conventional farming systems results poor soil condition (low fertility and soil physics characteristic, especially soil compaction) that fail to support plant growth. Soil compaction improvement is one of management effort on soil physics properties to obtain more suited physical environment for plant growth especially paddy. This research was aimed to study the effect of rice straw application and soil compaction on soil physics characteristic and to determine the soil bulk density and dose of mulch that effective for paddy growth and yield. Soil compaction treatment was divided into three soil bulk densities i.e. 0.8, 1.0, and 1.2 g/cm3. Each soil compaction was treated by rice straw mulch application in various doses i.e. 0%, 30%, 60%, and 90% of covered surface. Completed random design is used as experimental design and Honesty Significant Different (HSD) is used to identify the effect of treatment. The results showed that the interaction between soil compaction and mulch affect significantly on plant height in 5 weeks after growing, number of tillers in 4 weeks after growing, wet weight of root, wet biomass, weight of dry grain at harvest, time of harvest. Soil compaction was significantly affecting the field capacity water content, soil resistance before planting, plant height at 7 and 8 weeks after growing, number of tillers at 6, 8, and 9 weeks after growing also dry biomass also water content, bulk density and total of pore spaces after planting. Mulch application had only significant effect on plant height at 6 weeks after harvest. Soil bulk density suited for paddy growth and yields is 1.0 g/cm3 with 90% of mulch dose. | en |
