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Concept
Soil health
Summary
Soil health is a state of a soil meeting its range of ecosystem functions as appropriate to its environment. In more colloquial terms, the health of soil arises from favorable interactions of all soil components (living and non-living) that belong together, as in microbiota, plants and animals. It is possible that a soil can be healthy in terms of eco-system functioning but not necessarily serve crop production or human nutrition directly, hence the scientific debate on terms and measurements.
Soil health testing is pursued as an assessment of this status but tends to be confined largely to agronomic objectives, for obvious reasons. Soil health depends on soil biodiversity (with a robust soil biota), and it can be improved via soil management, especially by care to keep protective living covers on the soil and by natural (carbon-containing) soil amendments. Inorganic fertilizers do not necessarily damage soil health if 1) used at appropriate and not excessive rates and 2) if they bring about a general improvement of overall plant growth which contributes more carbon-containing residues to the soil.
The term soil health is used to describe the state of a soil in:
Sustaining plant and animal productivity (agronomic focus);
Enhancing biodiversity (Soil biodiversity) (ecological focus);
Maintaining or enhancing water and air quality (environmental/climate focus);
Supporting human health and habitation.
sequestering carbon
Soil Health has partly if not largely replaced the expression "Soil Quality" that was extant in the 1990s. The primary difference between the two expressions is that soil quality was focused on individual traits within a functional group, as in "quality of soil for maize production" or "quality of soil for roadbed preparation" and so on. The addition of the word "health" shifted the perception to be integrative, holistic and systematic. The two expressions still overlap considerably. Soil Health as an expression derives from organic or "biological farming" movements in Europe, however, well before soil quality was first applied as a discipline around 1990.
Official source
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