Soil quality: Goals for national policy
Excerpt
Modern science is revolutionizing our concept of soil resources, creating a much richer vision of soil as a living, dynamic system that drives crop production and mediates the effect of farming on the environment. National policy has not yet incorporated this new understanding of what the soil does for us, and we are probably a farm bill away from anything resembling a comprehensive soil quality policy. It is time, however, to begin thinking about what we want a soil quality policy to achieve. I suggest the following objectives as a starting point.
Establish soil-air-water quality parity. The management and protection of soil resources should become a cornerstone of national natural resource and environmental policy. Soil resources should receive the same attention and the same compreheusive treatment as air and water resources. We need to set national goals for soil quality, and those goals should recognize the inherent links between soil, water, and air quality. The goals we set for soil quality should go beyond reducing erosion to address other important forms of soil degradation.
Emphasize soil management and soil restoration. Our expanding understanding of the inherent links among soil, water, and air quality breaks down the convenient dichotomy between on-site and off-site damages of soil degradation. A soil quality policy should bring us back “on-site,” but in a different way than we have been there before. Soil management, that is, manipulation of the soil to achieve certain properties, infiltration, porosity, nutrient holding capacity, for example, should become an explicit objective of farm and ranch conservation plans rather than an indirect effect of erosion control. …
Footnotes
Craig Cox is an economist with the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Washington, D.C.
- Copyright 1995 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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