Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to accept that, supposedly, any accompanying soil degradation and loss of ecosys-
tem services are inevitable and “natural” consequences of farming—consequences
that can be kept under control but not avoided altogether. This view is increasingly
being challenged and considered to be outdated, and inherited farming practices
are considered unable to deliver the multifunctional objectives of productivity with
ecosystem services now being demanded from agricultural land and producers who
use it for farming.
In the past three decades, ideas and concepts, as well as an ecosystem approach
to sustainable production intensification, have led to the emergence of an alternative
approach to farming across all continents. The title of this chapter is “Sustainable
Soil Management Is More Than What and How Crops Are Grown.” Not only how
and what crops are grown matters but also the interactions of the two in space
and time lead to effects and consequences that influence system performance and
delivery of ecosystem services. Some ecosystem services involve processes such as
hydrological, carbon, and nutrient cycling that operate at the level of the fields on
farms, landscapes, watersheds, and beyond. In addition, agricultural soil manage-
ment is undertaken within different farming systems for the purpose of producing
biological products for markets, and a range of production inputs, equipment and
machinery, and management skills are needed to operate successfully. Thus, the
topic of sustainable soil management has a wide and complex scope as reflected in
the list of 10 tenets proposed by Lal (2009).
This chapter is about soil degradation in agricultural land, its root causes, and what
solutions are being implemented in different parts of the world to integrate sustainable
soil management into sustainable farming and landscape management. Section 14.2
describes what is meant by agricultural soil degradation and its extent. Section 14.3 pro-
vides an explanation of some of the major causes of soil degradation in agricultural land
use and illustrates three cases of widespread soil degradation in contrasting environ-
ments. This is followed, in Section 14.4, by a discussion on the elements of sustainable
soil management. Section 14.5 provides an elaboration of sustainable soil management
based on the agroecological paradigm that is increasingly being promoted internation-
ally, including how sustainable soil management has been able to restore degraded soils
in different agricultural environments. Section 14.6 illustrates the kind of contributions
crop management, intercropping, crop-livestock integration, and farm power that can
make to sustainable soil management objective. Section 14.7 presents three examples
of large-scale landscape level ecosystem service benefits that are being harnessed from
sustainable soil management systems. This is followed by Section 14.8 on policy and
institutional implications for sustainable soil management. Section 14.9 offers some
concluding remarks regarding the current trend toward sustainable soil management
and what policy makers can do to support the trend.
14.2 AGRICULTURAL SOIL DEGRADATION:
DEFINITIONS AND EXTENT
Soil is considered to be a nonrenewable resource that ensures crucial environmental,
social, and economic functions, and it has a central role in any approach aimed at
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