Winter wheat-soybean relay cropping experiment (V440).

The goal of this experiment was to test the agronomic viability of winter wheat-soybean relay intercropping as a crop diversification strategy in northeastern Germany. We investigated the effect of irrigation and wheat variety on the systems’ performance. The experiment was set up as a randomized block trial with 6 replicates over 3 years from 2021-2023. We had three cropping systems: sole soy, sole winter wheat, and winter wheat soy relay intercropping. Sole crops were managed with 12.5 cm and 50 cm row width for wheat and soy, respectively.

Relay intercropping was managed as double 12.5 cm row of winter wheat with a 37.5 cm gap where soy was drilled in the spring. We additionally tested two irrigation levels (irrigated and rainfed) as well as two winter wheat varieties (RGT Reform and Moschus) for a total of 10 treatments and 60 plots per year. Plots were 3 x 8 m in size and managed conventionally. At 3-4 points in the growing season, we measured several aspects of crop development and resource use including leaf area index (LAI), soil moisture, plant height, and biomass allocations. At harvest we measured grain yield, grain N, P and K, and thousand grain weight. Detailed soil and weather data is part of this data set. The experiment serves for agronomic studies (e.g. the paper ‘Seasonal soil health dynamics in soy-wheat relay intercropping’ by Thompson et al.) and for soil-crop modelling (e.g. the paper ‘Modelling crop yield in a wheat–soybean relay intercropping system: A simple routine in capturing competition for light’ by Yu et al.). This table contains the index of all tables forming this data collection.

Related datasets are listed in the metadata element 'Related Identifier'.
Dataset version 1.0