The main property of land soils as natural elements is their fertility. The vitality of all living creatures of the planet, plants and, of course, people depends on this quality.
Soil as the main component of nature uses all its resources (energy of the sun, nutrients), generates them in the so-called beneficial substances and supplies them with plants, which, in turn, are consumed by both animals and humanity. The bio-physicochemical processes taking place in the soil cover are not simple, and its fertility depends on the content of the constituents in the soil (falling into it and forming in it).
What is characterized by soil fertility?
From the foregoing, it is concluded that land fertility is the ability of soils of various types to ensure the growth and reproduction of all kinds of plants under favorable conditions, which are not limited only to a balanced combination of moisture and heat.
Ancient symbols of fertility of the earth
A symbol of the fertility of the ancient Slavs was a rhombus, schematically divided into four parts, dots were depicted in each segment of the figure. Rhombus meant cultivated fields, and dots - the crops grown on them.
The symbol of fertility was applied to agricultural implements, the walls of the house and brought, according to the ancient inhabitants, prosperity and grace. The rhombus depicted to some extent became the founder of the division of agricultural land into separate sections, and then fields.
In modern times, the symbol of fertility of the land is a spikelet or a sown wheat field.
Fertility Classification
Fertility is not only a natural property of the land, but also an indicator of soil quality, which is the most important criterion in agricultural production.
From an agrotechnical point of view, the following types of land fertility are distinguished:
- natural (natural);
- artificial (effective);
- economic.
These concepts are guided by many modern agronomists who analyze the state of fertility and, depending on the indicator obtained, apply one or another technology of cultivating the soil cover of agricultural land.
Characterization of types of fertility
Natural fertility is an indicator of the quality of the soil that it possesses without various human, labor and mechanical resource interventions, as well as chemical and mineral components. In modern times, this figure is high only in areas where modern technological processes of cultivating land are not applied. The percentage of such today is very low.
Effective fertility is the qualities that the land possesses as a result of the direct impact on it of purposeful human labor and enterprise, which include all agricultural processes using a mechanized resource, reclamation and, of course, the use of fertilizers - organic and mineral, as well as destructive pests. Effective fertility is created in order to achieve high yields, their implementation and high profits.
Economic fertility is an indicator of economic valuation of land, the basis of which is its potential ability to bear fruit and the economic properties of certain areas.
Under the potential abilities of the lands is understood a combination of their natural properties and acquired as a result of cultivation of lands by man.
Natural fertility is the most demanded in modern times due to the depletion of many land soils due to excessive mechanized processes. A lot of modern landowners are trying to gradually move precisely to the natural restoration of soil quality without the use of agrotechnical and agrochemical measures.
Characterization of relative soil fertility
The above types of fertility can be reduced to one more definition - relative fertility, which is understood as the ability of land soil to nourish certain types of plants and reject others. Moreover, no observance of crop rotation does not give any positive result on such soils.
In all natural processes, soil soils and types of vegetation are very closely related and determine the positive properties of each other. After all, plant growth, their productivity and natural strength are due to soil fertility, and it, in turn, depends on the type of vegetation on the soil cover.
If the vegetative background of the land changes, then their fertility changes. If you evaluate all the lands of the globe, you can see that there are much less desert sites than those that are filled with their characteristic vegetation. So, the wetlands are filled with hygrophilous vegetation, acidic podzolic soils or salt marshes are suitable for forest plantations. From this it follows that all types of soils have their own limit of natural fertility, but not in assessing the overall indicator, but with regards to certain types of plants.
It follows from this that different parts of the soil cover have unequal soil fertility with respect to potentiality and effectiveness with respect to many plant species.
Since there is a clear understanding that certain soils have the potential for favorable cultivation of certain crops, the most favorable lands for this purpose are used for agricultural purposes. These are mainly fertile chernozems.
Elements of land fertility
Fertility of the soil is formed in the process of its natural structuring and is determined not only by the feature, for example, the content of nutrients or humus, but also covers all its inherent characteristics. The fertility of individual sites is determined not only by the state of the upper soil layers, but also depends on the deep structure, which affects vegetation with a deep root system.
Thus, fertility depends entirely on the profile of the land, on its upper and lowland structures, on the availability of groundwater, on the quality of the subsoil layers - clay or rocky. The elements of the soil fertility indicator include the physical, biological and chemical properties of the soil and their annual dynamics - the granulometric composition of the land profile, the structure of soil layers, water-physical properties, biological components, and the ability to absorb heat and moisture.
Classification of agricultural land depending on the indicator of fertility
Land is the main means of production in agriculture, the fertility of which is always the main theme of the day. It is soil fertility that determines the future crop rotation. The planned end result for harvesting always depends on the quality of the soil.
Agricultural land - agricultural land, which includes hayfields and pastures, fallow lands, perennial plantings and arable land.
Haymaking is the area used for haying in order to provide livestock with grass feed during the winter growing season. Depending on their fertility, they are classified into floodplains - the richest in lush vegetation, dry, swampy, inaccessible, filled with shrubs or in the surrounding forests, littered with stones and hummocks, artificially improved clean.
Pastures are land that is intended for grazing cattle in the spring, summer, autumn periods of cultivation. Vegetation on pastures is more scarce than on hayfields, due to the influence of the factor of multiple trampling of cattle by many species of plants. They, in turn, are divided into dry and boggy, cultivated improved.
Perennial plantings include orchards and berry plants, vineyards. Deposits are arable land unused for sowing for more than a year.
And the most valuable type of agricultural land is arable land, which is used for sowing grain, corn, sunflower, rapeseed, buckwheat and planting vegetables. Depending on the indicator of natural fertility, arable land is classified as irrigated, drained, insufficiently moistened, prone to erosion, and littered with stones.
Land Fertility Assessment
Depending on the purpose of the agricultural land, an assessment is made of their potential properties to reproduce a certain amount of the yield of certain crops.
Agricultural lands in combination with natural plant balance can be characterized by an indicator of a high level of fertility and its low value. Fertility is determined by the specific gravity of biomass accumulating in the soil cover due to the growth of either one or other crops on the land.
The main indicator of fertility in agricultural production is the productivity of arable soils. The state land cadastre, dividing the land by the quality of fertility, focuses on the value of the potential yield indicator, which cannot be stable if the soil is used for other purposes or does not adhere to a certain crop rotation that does not deplete soil fertility, but, on the contrary, increases their potential to give high yields.
Agricultural land cultivation
Many land experts are of the opinion that the fertility of the land is increasing due to modern scientific and technical methods of cultivating it. However, long-term practice also shows the opposite result, which characterizes its decline. The cultivation of land cover does not always lead to the preservation of the natural balance of the structure of soil cover.
Each cultivated crop on a particular land plot changes the natural biochemical composition of the soil and selects a lot of nutrients from it. Because of this, additional measures to restore fertility are required. Moisture evaporation, soil erosion, low humus and nutrient content are the result of unprofessional cultivation of land.
If the soil resource is characterized by high fertility in the first years of land cultivation, then after several years of its operation with the help of mechanized processing it leads to a significant decrease in this indicator due to the depletion of the upper layers of the earth, due to which various agrotechnical measures are used to restore the natural balance by artificial methods. If no measures are taken, then the land loses its ability to produce high yields, and this process is called soil fatigue.
Fertility factors
From the foregoing, it follows that certain factors reflecting the relationship of soil, microorganisms and plants influence the fertility of cultivated lands.
These include an indicator of acidity, clay content, salt and alkali content, heat content, water, surface slope, chemical and biological soil toxicosis, lack of aeration.
Elimination and minimization of influencing factors to reduce land fertility
Increasing soil fertility is reduced to agrotechnical measures that restore the natural balance of the land and minimize the impact of the above factors:
- with excess acidity, soil liming is performed;
- with excessive alkali content - acidification, gypsum, physiologically acidic fertilizers;
- with excess salts - flushing of groundwater;
- with high clay content - deep loosening, sand application;
- at a high density of the soil cover - loosening, grass sowing and structuring of the soil composition;
- with a lack of nutrients - the introduction of mineral and organic fertilizers;
- in chemical and biological toxicosis - fallow and agrotechnological land reclamation.
Seasonal Soil Fertilizer
Often, increasing the fertility of arable land is carried out by applying mineral fertilizers. It is these elements that are the source of nutrient-deficient chemicals for plants.
Fertilizing soil in the spring involves the introduction of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. In the autumn, soils are enriched with nutrients with the help of organic types of fertilizers - manure, humus, plant slurry.
Improvement of agricultural land fertility
The increase in land fertility is affected not only by soil fertilization in spring and autumn, but also by the proper observance of the proportions of fertilizers applied, since the deficiency and surplus of them is characterized by a decrease in land productivity.
Soil fertilizer is always combined with crop rotation indicators, mechanized treatments and land reclamation measures.