The no-tillage system has already been acclaimed as a conservational system of agricultural cultivation, what has motivated this work, through which it was aimed to analyze the consolidation time of this system, considering maize plantations with no-tillage system implemented between 2 to 14 years. This analysis has been done through the measuring of areas of the present structures in the cropping profile with GIS and later, evaluated by the statistical method of principal components. The structures where no-tillage system has been implemented for less than eight years are similar to conventional cultivation, and where it has been implemented for more than nine years are similar to forest cultivation, leading to the conclusion that the period of consolidation of no-tillage system is between the ninth and tenth year after its implementation, for the conditions of the analyzed area. The excess of details in the nomenclature of morphological homogeneous units makes the data analysis difficult.
geocoding; principal component analysis; morphological homogeneous units; ArcView; cropping profile method
