Sustainable Soil Management Is More than What and How Crops Are Grown - Principles of Sustainable Soil Management in Agroecosystems - page 342

landscape is exposed and unprotected, and soil life is starved of organic matter,
reduced in biological activity, and deprived of habitat. The loss of soil biodiversity,
damaged structure, and its self-recuperating capacity or resilience, increased topsoil
and subsoil compaction, runoff and erosion, and greater infestation by pests, patho-
gens, and weeds indicate the current poor state of the health of many of our soils.
In the developing regions, this is a major cause for inadequate food and nutrition
se cu r it y.
In industrialized countries, the poor condition of soils due to excessive distur-
bance through mechanical tillage is being exacerbated by
1. Overreliance on application of mineral fertilizers, as the main source of
plant nutrients, onto farmland that has been losing its ability to respond
to nutrient inputs due to degradation in biological soil health—related to
declining stocks of soil carbon—including loss/destruction of adequate soil
porosity and reduced soil moisture storage and increased runoff, leading to
poor root system, nutrient loss, and decrease in nutrient uptake
2. Reducing or doing away with crop diversity and rotations including legumes
and pastures (which were largely in place around the time of World War II
[WWII]) facilitated by high levels of agrochemical inputs, standardized
fixed agronomy, and commodity-based market forces that are insensitive to
on-farm and landscape ecosystem functions.
The situation in industrialized nations is now leading to further problems of
increased threats from insect pests, diseases, and weeds against which farmers are
forced to apply even more pesticides and herbicides, and which further damages
biodiversity and pollutes the environment.
It seems that with mechanical tillage (intensive or otherwise) and with low soil
input of atmospheric carbon and nitrogen and exposed soil surfaces as a basis of the
current agriculture production and intensification paradigm, we have now arrived
at a “dangerous” point in soil and agroecosystem degradation globally, including
in the industrialized North. However, we also know that the solution for sustain-
able soil management for farming has been known for a long time, at least since the
mid-1930s when the Midwest of the United States suffered massive dust storms and
soil degradation due to intensive plowing of the prairies. Dust bowls and large-scale
soil degradation continue to occur in vast regions and in developed and developing
countries (Baveye et al. 2011), despite the recognition of soil health being critical to
life on earth.
For instance, in 1945, Edward Faulkner wrote a book Ploughman's Folly in which
he provocatively stated that there is no scientific evidence for the need to plow. More
recently, David Montgomery in his well-researched book Dirt: The Erosion of
Civilizations shows that generally with any form of tillage, including noninversion
tillage, the rate of soil degradation (loss of soil health) and soil erosion is generally
by orders of magnitude greater than the rate of soil formation, rendering agroeco-
systems unsustainable. According to Montgomery's research, tillage has caused the
destruction of the agricultural resource base and of its productive capacity nearly
everywhere, and continues to do so (Montgomery 2007).