EESA01H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Soil Retrogression And Degradation, Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods, Soil Structure
14 Dec 2015
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Major problem: not all land is arable. Good climate with a lot of water. Topography more difficult to deal with (more hills and stuff) Rocks that are outcropping, so soil is probably not that deep. A lot of rocks, cannot plough this down, soil is not fertile. 4. 3 x 106 km2 = 1/3 current global cropland. Current rate of loss = 200,000 km2 yr-1. Loss due to urban-industrial sprawl around toronto, for instance. You have hyper fertile soils for like 5 years and then it died and can never grow. Class 1 through 8 essentially go from great farmland to land of little use. Ideal soil: loamy mixture with neutral ph that is workable and can hold nutrients. Increasingly, productivity is being limited by human influences on what used to be great cropland. Waterlogging - too much water and get chemical issues. Sulfide in water - that egg smell. Erosion - literal loss of soil mass from any area.
