Applicability of soil health assessment for wheat-maize cropping systems in smallholders’ farmlands

Abstract

Soil health assessment is fundamental to guiding sustainable soil management practices, ensuring healthy soil, crop productivity, and provision of other ecosystem services. Interpretation of soil health in intensive agriculture in the North China Plain (NCP) is still lacking due to an over emphasis on soil chemical management and large variations among smallholders’ farmlands. The objectives of this study were to (i) compare soil health assessment approaches in response to fertilization regimes, (ii) quantify relationships between soil health and agronomic outcomes, (iii) develop a minimum data set to simplify soil health assessment, and (iv) validate soil health assessment frameworks in smallholders’ fields on the NCP. We collected soil samples from eight wheat-maize rotation long-term experiments which were divided into three fertilization regimes: (1) NPK, application of chemical fertilizers only; (2) M, application of organic materials only; and (3) MNPK, combined application of organic materials with chemical fertilizer application. Three soil health indexing (SHI) approaches, Comprehensive Assessment of Soil Health (SHI-CASH), linear (SHI-L) and sigmoidal (SHI-Sig) were evaluated. SHIs in the M and MNPK treatments were significantly higher than those in the NPK treatment across assessment approaches and were positively correlated with maize yield. A minimum data set including subsurface hardness, wet aggregate stability, available K, available Fe, soil organic carbon and soil protein was established using best subset regression. The soil health indices of smallholders’ farmlands using CASH and MDS were 0.58 (0.42–0.73) and 0.63 (0.40–0.87), respectively. More than 60% smallholders’ fields was at middle or low level. The relationship between SHI-CASH and SHI-MDS (Sig) was better than those for the CASH and linear methods. Our results demonstrate that an MDS based on best subset regression is applicable for evaluating soil health in wheat-maize rotation systems in the NCP. Soil health assessment in smallholders’ farmland indicates that soil health constraints are related to soil and biomass management, which provides insights on pathways towards addressing soil health gaps.