Soil Management offers information to manage agricultural soil for optimum crop yields and at the same time maintaining or improving the capacity of soil to provide essential ecosystem functions.
Soil is the foundation of terrestrial life. It provides many essential ecosystem functions, such as providing a medium for plants to grow in, absorbing, filtering, and slowly releasing water, housing bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, arthroprods, and higher level animals, recycling nutrients and organic wastes, and storing and releasing greenhouse gasses.
“Our solution for safeguarding our soils on slopes where soil erosion by water is the hazard is (1) to increase rainwater-intake capacity of the soil by retaining crop litter at the surface, soil improvement, crop rotations, and strip cropping on the contour and (2) to lead away unabsorbed storm waters in channels of broad-base terraces into outlet channels and into natural drainage channels.”