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Soil Quality for Sustainable Agriculture

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Nutrient Dynamics for Sustainable Crop Production

Abstract

Being integral to all functions of terrestrial ecosystem, soil is intended to produce food for feeding the growing population of the world. However, food security is facing threat from soil degradation occurring worldwide. Soils degrade due to the exerting pressure from various sectors of the society including urbanization and industrialization. The major driving forces of soil degradation are deforestation, change in land use, soil erosion, uncontrolled grazing, waste disposal, and unscientific land management. Globally, 24% (350 lakh km2) of the land has degraded which is increasing at the rate of 50–100 lakh ha year−1 and poses threat to the livelihood of more than 1500 million people. In this scenario, sustaining soil quality (SQ) is the major challenge to meet the increasing food demand. Hence, evaluating and monitoring SQ is crucial to sustain agricultural production and to overcome the vagaries of climate change on soil functions. However, soil quality per se is complex and site-specific because of the larger variety of soil usage, and its evaluation is difficult due to the subjectivity. Nonetheless, soil quality can be quantified in the form of an index for temporal and spatial comparison of various land use and management systems. In this chapter, we discuss the concept and importance of SQ, indicators of SQ, minimum data set (MDS) for evaluating SQ, methods of MDS selection, and indexing of the soil quality. It will bring out the effect of soil and crop management practices such as tillage, cropping systems, cover crops, and nutrient management on soil quality and crop production focusing in tropical environments. We conclude that principal component analysis is an effective method to select MDS from a large set of soil properties and weighted index method of quantifying SQ proved to be efficient in predicting changes in SQ under various crop production systems. Conservation tillage methods coupled with integrated nutrient management sustains or aggrades the soil quality in different agroecosystems.

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Abbreviations

BD:

Bulk density

C:

Carbon

CEC:

Cation exchange capacity

CO2 :

Carbon dioxide

CT:

Conservation tillage

DT:

Decision trees

EC:

Electrical conductivity

ESP:

Exchangeable sodium percentage

FAO:

Food and Agriculture Organization

Fe:

Iron

FYM:

Farmyard manure

I:

Iodine

IGP:

Indo-Gangetic plains

INM:

Integrated nutrient management

K:

Potassium

MBC:

Microbial biomass carbon

MDS:

Minimum data set

M-SQR:

Muencheberg soil quality rating

MT:

Minimum tillage

N:

Nitrogen

NRCS:

Natural resources conservation service

NT:

No tillage

P:

Phosphorus

PC:

Principal components

PCA:

Principal component analysis

QBS-ar:

Soil biological quality-arthropod

S:

Sulfur

SMT:

Stubble-mulch tillage

SOC:

Soil organic carbon

SOM:

Soil organic matter

SQ:

Soil quality

SQI:

Soil quality index

Zn:

Zinc

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICAR – National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land-Use Planning, Nagpur, India

    Duraisamy Vasu, Pramod Tiwary, Padikkal Chandran & Surendra Kumar Singh

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  1. Duraisamy Vasu
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  1. Department of Agronomy, Institute of Agricultural Sciences (BHU), Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Ram Swaroop Meena

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Vasu, D., Tiwary, P., Chandran, P., Singh, S.K. (2020). Soil Quality for Sustainable Agriculture. In: Meena, R. (eds) Nutrient Dynamics for Sustainable Crop Production. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8660-2_2

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