Excerpt
PLANT the best, save the rest.” This familiar idea has acquired new legal meaning as a result of the sod-buster, swampbuster, and conservation reserve provisions of the 1985 Food Security Act. Identifying the best land is, unfortunately, an unfinished task. Important criteria include productivity, workability, erodibility, accessibility, contiguity, and management history. A look at only the first of these factors allows one to evaluate the potential usefulness of some common procedures for ranking soils according to their “innate productivity.”
A good (reliable and easy to determine) index of soil productivity clearly would be useful for many groups of people: landowners deciding how to use their land; tax assessors appraising rural property (2, 16); municipalities zoning land to influence its use (22); planners aligning utility corridors (4, 15); foresters and wildlife biologists trying to evaluate sustainable yield (3, 17); the U.S. Department of Agriculture targeting regions for price supports, conservation practices, or land-retirement programs (1, 21); rural sociologists and others trying to designate prime farmland for protection of a way of life (19); financiers assessing the feasibility of development projects (18); and soil scientists trying to provide accurate information to all of the above groups (5, 10, 20). …
Footnotes
P. J. Gersmehl and D. A. Brown are professors in the Department of Geography. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 55455. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant number SES-8618417.
- Copyright 1990 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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