Marginality Principle - Principles of Sustainable Soil Management in Agroecosystems - page 47

currently participating in CRP (Arbuckle et al. 2011). Several patterns emerge over
three decades of polling Iowa farmers: (1) Public investments in markets and price
supports are higher priorities than soil erosion and conservation interventions.
(2) Farmers expect that government should fund conservation and believe that these
programs reduce soil erosion. (3) Farmers believe that they are doing a good job on
their farm protecting soil resources. A majority of farmers (51%) in the 2011 IFRLP
reported that they had incurred no conservation expenditure at all in the 10 years
prior to the 2011 survey, with an additional 21% reporting spending less than $5000
(Arbuckle et al. 2011). This strongly suggests that while farmers support conserva-
tion initiatives funded by government, they are not willing to invest their own money.
More research is needed to understand the reasons. Iowa farmers seem unconvinced
that protecting the soil is their responsibility and that the long-term sustainability of
their farm enterprise depends on it. Iowa farmers do not represent all farmers, and
these results must be interpreted with caution. Beliefs may vary by systems of agri-
culture, crop choices, state or country locations, economic conditions, and a whole
set of other factors. These findings do suggest that whoever controls the definition of
risk controls the rational solution to the problem at hand. Soil degradation, which is
considered a significant risk by soil scientists, may not be assigned a similar high risk
level by agricultural land managers whose management practices affect soil quality
and marginality. When farmers and public policy makers define risks to agriculture
as short term and economic, then certain options will rise to the top as the most
effective, the safest, or the best. If we define risk another way, we will likely get
a different ordering of our action solutions (Slovic 2009). The challenge is to help
policy makers and farmers to recognize that the quiet crisis at hand will eventually
become a social crisis that compromises the soils' capacities to provision society and
support a healthy ecosystem.
2.8 CONCLUSIONS
Soil is a fragile resource supplying many goods and services. Given the diversity
of soil across the world and within a landscape, there are many different capacities
among soils to provide the basic soil functions. Marginality of soils is a difficult
process to define because the metrics to define a marginal soil depend upon the use,
and if we utilize the framework of soil capability classes, then a marginal soil could
be defined as one that moves from a higher to a lower class soil. The processes of
soil degradation from a biological, physical, or chemical viewpoint contribute to the
marginality of soils, and as a soil degrades, it will become more marginal. However,
a view of marginality of soil will depend upon the intended use of the soil. Water
availability in the soil is a critical component for crop productivity, and environmen-
tal quality and a degraded soil with reduced capacity to absorb, infiltrate, or retain
water will provide marginal services for crop production and increase the likelihood
of environmental quality concerns. Soil degradation is a major threat to soils around
the world and limits the capacity of a given soil to support the different functions,
of which providing food for humankind is foremost. Reversal of soil degradation
by restoring organic matter and improving soil biological activity offsets the trend
toward marginality in soils.