In the conditions of global climate warming and its increasing aridity, chickpeas can become one of the main leguminous crops in the zone of insufficient and unstable humidity. In terms of drought resistance, this crop is significantly superior to spiked cereals [1–4].

In world agriculture, chickpeas occupy the third place among grain legumes in terms of sowing area — 10–12 million hectares, in Russia, the sown area of chickpeas is about 20–25 thousand hectares. Its crops in 2018 in the Samara Region amounted to 88.5 thousand hectares with an average crop yield of 10.5 c/ha. The cultivated areas of the chickpeas in the region and in the Volga region as a whole will expand, due to economic reasons (growing exports), and the tendency to increase its processing for the production of food and high-protein feed for livestock [5].

One of the main conditions for increasing the yield of chickpeas and the profitability of its production is the development and introduction of new resource-saving crop cultivation technologies. The solution of this problem is possible only based on the application of scientifically sound and constantly improving all elements of the adaptive landscape system of agriculture, as well as the achievements of agricultural science and practice [2, 6, 7].

Among the elements of the adapted technology, an important role is assigned to the basic tillage.

In this regard, the purpose of our research was to identify rational tillage for chickpeas.

To achieve the purpose, tasks were set, which included studying the effect of basic tillage on productive moisture reserves and soil density, crop contamination and chickpea yield.

The research was carried out in 2018–2019 at the experimental field of the Department of Land Management, Soil Science and Agrochemistry in the grain-steam crop rotation, where winter wheat was the predecessor of chickpeas.

The design of the experiment included the following options for the basic tillage: