Tillage is a central element in agricultural soil management and has direct and indirect effects on processes in the biosphere. Effects of agricultural soil management can be assessed by soil, crop, and ecosystem models but global assessments are hampered by lack of information on soil management systems. This study presents a classification of globally relevant tillage practices and a global spatially explicit data set on the distribution of tillage practices for around the year 2005. This source code complements the dataset on the global gridded tillage system mapping described in Porwollik et al. (2018, http://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2018.012). It shall help interested people in understanding the findings on the global gridded tillage system mapping. The code, programmed in R, can be used for reproducing and build upon for scenarios including the expansion of sustainable soil management practices as CA. Both, the data set and the R-code are described in detail in Porwollik et al. (2018, ESSD). The code is written in the statistical software 'R' using the 'raster', 'fields', and 'ncdf4' packages. We present the mapping result of six tillage systems for 42 crop types and potentially suitable Conservation Agriculture area as variables:1 = conventional annual tillage2 = traditional annual tillage3 = reduced tillage4 = Conservation Agriculture5 = rotational tillage6 = traditional rotational tillage7 = potential suitable Conservation Agriculture area Reference system: WGS84Geographic extent: Longitude (min, max) (-180, 180), Latitude (min, max) (-56, 84)Resolution: 5 arc-minutesTime period covered: around the year 2005Type: NetCDF Dataset sources (with indication of reference):1. Grid cell allocation key to country: IFPRI/IIASA (2017, cell5m_allockey_xy.dbf.zip)2. Crop-specific physical cropland: IFPRI/IIASA (2017, spam2005v3r1_global_phys_area.geotiff.zip)3. SoilGrids depth to bedrock: Hengl et al. (2014)4. Aridity index: FAO (2015)5. Conservation Agriculture area: FAO (2016)6. Income level: World Bank (2017)7. Field size: Fritz et al. (2015)8. Water erosion: Nachtergaele et al. (2011)