Development of a soil quality decision support tool to identify and support best management practices

摘要

Understanding and managing the effects of soil and crop management practices on soil quality and crop production is essential to maintaining profitable and environmentally sustainable farming enterprises. The Land Management Index (LMI) decision support tool was developed to assist land managers predict the effects of current management practices on soil quality and allows them to run "what if?" scenarios to support future paddock-scale management decisions. To achieve this, a total 14 different indicators of soil quality were measured on >700 paddocks representing the major soils orders and agricultural land uses across seven New Zealand regions. Detailed soil and crop management information (e.g. crop type, sowing/harvest dates, tillage type, irrigation) was also collected for the 10 years proceeding sampling for each paddock. The model was developed by first defining a minimum dataset of critical soil quality indicators and then establishing empirical relationships between these indicators and quantitative measures of the soil and crop management information. These empirical relationships formed the basis of the first generation LMI (ver 1.1) decision support tool that was released for use by farmers and resource managers in June 2009.