Understanding and managing the causes of soil variability

Excerpt

Over the past few decades, a tremendous amount of time and money has gone into developing and applying technologies to manage crop variability within fields. Table 1 lists in order the factors that most commonly cause crop variability. The information in this table was developed by Aspinall (1997) based on several years of experience in southern Ontario, and it is considered to apply to many other agricultural regions. Clearly, there are many causes of crop variability, and several are either directly or indirectly linked to soil erosion.

The purpose of this paper is to bring attention to soil erosion as a cause of soil landscape variability and to the potential to affect crop variability by managing soil erosion. The underlying message is that sound management of variable soil landscapes requires a balanced approach—the causes of the variability must be managed as well as the effects.