Soil Quality - Concepts, Methods of Assessment and Strategies for Improvement

摘要

Subsistence agriculture under rainfed conditions and declining or stagnant yields on irrigated lands are serious challenges for the country's food security. Among several other causes, land degradation and deteriorating soil quality are considered as important hurdles in breaking the yield barriers. Reversal of land degradation and restoring back the quality of soil to the original level is rather a very difficult task. In order to have timely corrections, it is essential to assess the periodical changes in soil quality as influenced by long-term crop husbandry and soil management practices. There are several approaches to interpret the soil test data to arrive at certain conclusions about the status of soil quality and to make recommendations about the suitable measures for correcting it. As the soil tests are expensive and time- consuming, these tests cannot be taken up by the farmers for all the physical, chemical and biological soil properties periodically. Hence, the key indicator approach which considers only the important representative soil properties identified using various data redundancy steps has been found to be very effective and useful tool to assess soil quality. After the identification of key indicators and computation of integrated soil quality indices (SQI) for a given situation, appropriate soil-crop management practices are suggested. This paper deals comprehensively with concepts of soil quality, various approaches to assess soil quality, importance of soil quality indicators and strategies to improve soil quality on long-term basis.