European Journal of Sustainable Agroecosystems

Background: Conservation agriculture (CA) is underpinned by the concept of minimum tillage, permanent soil cover, and crop rotations. CA plays an important role in enhancing productivity and the sustainability of the wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) production system. However, most existing studies on CA focus only on the effects of CA on soil carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles.
Objective: This review you is conducted in order to present existing peer-reviewed studies addressing the C-N-W nexus in the system of wheat-based agriculture and focusing on soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics, nitrogen transformations, losses of nitrous oxide (N20), processes of water infiltration, and the effect of all these factors on the soil condition and productivity of the system.
Sources: The literature was gathered from Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Nature Journals, and Frontiers journals, and documents from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), concentrating on articles from 2014 to 2026 along with prior studies.
Main results: CA helps in increasing surface layer SOC, and biological indicators of soil quality, however to a large extent, those improvements are compensated by carbon losses from subsoil, increased emissions of N2O from residue-enriched moisture-retaining sites, and nitrogen immobilization in a short period of time associated with rich carbon-to-nitrogen residues. Water productivity was the main reliable outcome from nexus approach, but it relied on careful management of irrigation and nitrogen use especially in water-scarce Indo-Gangetic Plains, although the yield output remains uncertain: world meta-analysis indicates that average yield losses from no-till is low, unless it is used in combination with residue preservation and rotation, while long-term trials in South Asia show that yield output is equal with substantially lower production costs.
Research gaps: There is still a lack of unified soil health indicators, as well as multi-decadal (>20-year) wheat field trials and comprehensive models of the C-N-W processes that have been calibrated for wheat; and finally, socio-economic adoption information related to smallholder farmers is scarce.
Conclusion: The sustainability of CA in systems with wheat depends on jointly managing the C-N-W chain and not optimizing a single indicator, while precision farming tools to manage nitrogen and water effectively could potentially help with that.