Agronomic performance of a front roller multi-disk harrow prototype for legume devitalization in temporary wheat-faba bean intercropping

The practice of cereal-legume temporary intercropping, with the legume devitalization in late winter, offers promising benefits for fall-sown organic cereal crop production, where nitrogen (N) availability is often limiting. This 3-year field experiment was focused on legume termination methods. The devitalization efficiency, operational characteristics and implications for wheat N availability, grain yield and quality of a novel non power-take-off (PTO) based front roller multi-disk harrow prototype (RMH) were compared to those of a conventional PTO-based split rotary hoeing (SRH) system. The results demonstrate that temporary intercropping significantly improves the Partial Factor Productivity of N as compared to traditional sole-crop wheat, with an average yield increase of 35 kg per kg of applied N. The RMH prototype was found to have no impact on the grain yield (3.82 vs. 3.73 Mg ha−1), quality or N uptake (80.3 vs. 80.2 kg ha−1) of wheat compared to SRH. Our research shows that the RMH prototype is as effective as the SRH in terms of devitalization efficacy of the legume component and N supply to wheat. Overall, the prototype appears to be a suitable tool for management of cereal-legume temporary intercropping in Mediterranean farming systems, with lower fuel consumption (-17.3 kg ha−1) than PTO machines.