Soil erosion and sustainable agriculture

Soil erosion and agricultural sustainability from David R. Montgomery article – bayfallgeology[if lt IE 8]> <link rel='stylesheet' id='highlander-comments-ie7-css' href='https://s1.wp.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/highlander-comments/style-ie7.css?m=1351637563h&#038;ver=20110606' type='text/css' media='all' /> <![endif] Jetpack Open Graph Tags

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  soilerosionandsustainability

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Degraded or eroded soils can be traced back to ancient times during great civilizations. Proof can be found into Plato and Aristotle literatures discussing about effects that people had and still have on the local environment.

In this blog, we will be discussing about soil erosion and sustainable agriculture. In other words we will be linking agriculture to civilization. In fact, soils erosion depends on soil properties, ground slope, the presence of vegetation and the amount of rainfall.

The rate of erosion is found to be greater than soil production, resulting in an important loss in fertile soils. The way agriculture is done is one of the most important factor on eroding soils. For instance a conventional plow-based agriculture increases the erosion rate, which proved their unsustainability. Moreover, recent archeologic findings proofs linked soil erosion and civilizations. In those ancient and actual civilizations, the dominant cause of soil erosion remains to be deforestation.

Scientists use different methodologies to address this issue. For this study, the methodology was based on studies of the rate of soil production, long-term geological erosion under native vegetation and agricultural fields. The geological erosion rates indeed are consisted of stratigraphic constrains, lake sedimentation, estimated depths but also radioactive dating using isotopes of Be 10, & Al 26 and also the estimate of the river’s sand for the whole catchment erosion rate. Another method used especially for no-till and conservation tillage studies was the use of Ce 137 and soil-loss data from experimental plots and field-scale investigation. The last method used was the correlation between the erosion rates (E) and the mean local relief (R), where E=0.2R.

Nowadays people are being kind of aware of the dangers of soil erosion and coming up with solutions. Thus, recent technics helped assess or correlate erosion rates to agricultural fields, where an estimate of anthropogenic increases in soil is incorporated on the universal soil loss equation. Erosion rates also can be assessed by studying the sediments yields in flood plains. In fact, the number of sediments decreases per-unit area sediments yield is related to an increase of drainage area. A convincing and common example is the construction of dams. When a dam is built, the sediments delivery is reduced by half.

An interesting idea to pursue would be the mitigation actions. In fact, researchers recently founded that no-till farming reduced soil erosion by over 90% over conventional tobacco cultivation. It would be great to expand that experimentation to other types of agriculture but also worldwide to reduce those soil-losses.

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