Soil management in organic fruit growing

In the EU-standards you will find a period of three years for converting your orchard from conventional into organic. But conversion of your way of thinking about the orchard system and conversion of your root system and soil will take double time. The focus must change from curative to preventive. Production, growth regulation, fertilisation, undergrowth, weed control and water management all come together in the overall soil management

Dutch soil management and soil fertility

The organic sector depends heavily on its soils. In the Netherlands, relatively little acreage is available per farm compared to other countries. This means that the soil has to be kept in optimal shape for production, be it vegetables, cereals, potatoes or animal feed and grassland. To facilitate organic farmers, Wageningen UR and Louis Bolk Institute carry out a variety of research aimed specifically at soil management and soil fertility. The report contains sector facts, sector aspirations, current affairs and research projects

Optimal Soil Management and Environmental Policy

This paper studies the effects of environmental policy on the farmer’s soil optimal management. We consider a dynamic economic model of soil erosion where the intensity use of inputs allows the farmer to control soil losses. Therefore, inputs use induces a pollution which is accentuated by the soil fragility. We show, at the steady state, that the environmental tax induces a more conservative farmer behavior for soil, but in some cases it can exacerbate pollution. These effects can be moderated when farmers introduce abatement activity.Soil erosion, Pollution, Environmental policy, Optimal soil conservation, Abatement activities

Soil management

Citation: Philbrook, Eva. Art in dress. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1897.Morse Department of Special CollectionsIntroduction: For the last fifty years the farmers of Kansas have been continually taking crops from the soil with little thought of returning anything to it. Likewise, little attention has been given to the rotation of crops and proper methods of tillage. Usually the only object in cultivation has been to kill weeds and consequently, many years, the yields have been smaller than they would have been if the field had had the proper treatment. Planting a field continuously to the same crop for twenty-five years or more has often largely exhausted certain forms of plant food that are essential to the growth and developement of that crop. This practice up to the present time has been yielding fairly good crops for the reason thtt the soil was new and rich in the necessary plant food elements. At present, however the older lands are becomming so exhausted that something must be done to stop this terrible drain upon the fertility of the soil. The average farm in Kansas may be made to produce perhaps half as much more than it is now producing by the application of the best methods of soil management. The great question that confronts the farmer of today is how to build up and maintain the soil fertility, how to conserve the moisture, and how to prevent the soil from blowing and washing

Land use decision modeling with dynamically updated soil carbon emission rates

Soil carbon can be sequestered through different land management options depending on the soil carbon status at the beginning of a management period. This initial status results from a given soil management history in a given soil climate regime. Similarly, the prediction of future carbon storage depends on the time sequence of future soil management. Unfortunately, the number of possible management trajectories reaches non-computable levels so fast that explicit representations of management trajectories are impractical for most existing land use decision models. Consequently, the impact of different management trajectories has been ignored. This article proposes a computationally feasible mathematical programming method for integration of soil status dependent sequestration rates in land use decision optimization models. The soil status is represented by an array of adjacent status classes. For each combination of soil management and initial soil status class, transition probabilities of moving into a new or staying in the same status class are computed. Subsequently, these probabilities are used in dynamic equations to update the soil status level before and after each new soil management period. To illustrate the impacts of the proposed method, a simple hypothetical land use decision model is solved for alternative specifications.Soil carbon sequestration, Sink dynamics, Mathematical programming, Land use, Optimization, Agriculture, Forestry, Greenhouse gas mitigation

Agroenvironmental transformation in the Sahel: Another kind of “Green Revolution"

millions fed, food security, Sahel, Zai, Stone bunds, Agroforestry, Soil management,