Year: 2000
Type: book
Abstract: Soil expertise is not communicated effectively enough to the public at large, nor to planners and politicians.Use of the land quality (LQ) concept and emphasis on soil behavior as a function of management are expected to be helpful in improving communications.Existing definitions of "soil quality" and "sustainable land management" are analyzed to derive a procedure for defining LQ indicators of sustainable land management.Land-rather than soil qualities are considered to reflect the impact of the climate and the landscape on soil behavior.Land quality is different for different types of land use and attention is arbitrarily confined here to agriculture.Simulation modeling of crop growth and solute fluxes is used to define land quality (LQ) as the ratio between yield and potential (or water-limited) yield (x 100), which defines a "yield gap LQ".For soils with nutrient mining, a nutrient-depletion LQ is defined.The actual agro-ecological condition and its potential, both expressed by LQ ' s for a given piece of land, is considered here as independent input into broader land-use discussions which tend to be dominated by socio-economic and political considerations.Agro-ecological considerations should not be held hostage to actual socio-economic and political considerations, which may change in the near future while LQ's have a much more permanent character.The proposed yield-gap LQ reflects yields and risks of production as simulations are made for many years, and soil and water quality associated with the production process is taken into account.Yields and pollution risks are expressed for Dutch conditions in terms of the probability that groundwater is polluted with nitrates.The proposed procedure requires the selection of acceptable production and pollution risks, before a LQ value can be obtained.Existing definitions implicitly emphasize the field and farm level.However, LQ is also important at the regional and higher level, which, so far, has received little attention.Then, again, an agro-ecological approach is suggested when defining LQ's as input into the planning process, emphasizing not only an independent assessment of the potential for agricultural production, but of nature conservation as well.
Author: J. Bouma
Institution: Wageningen University & Research
Language: English
Subfield: Agronomy and Crop Science
Domain: Life Sciences
SDGs: Life on land, Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2248229625