Abstract
Nutrient depletion and imbalanced use of fertiliser nutrients, inappropriate tillage and rain- water management practices often result in land degradation. Declining soil health contributes to climate change through loss in soil productivity, biodiversity, soil carbon, and moisture and ecosystem services. In order to address declining soil health, government of India has launched a soil health card (SHC) scheme aimed at need base use of chemical fertilisers. The paper points out the short-comings in the SHC scheme. Balanced and need base use of chemical fertilizers can be helpful in environmental protection and restoring soil health. The paper identifies potential agronomic practices and production management systems that can reduce our dependence on synthetic nutrients. Integration of soil fertility management domains with computer based QUEFT crop model has the potential of making fertiliser recommendations more domain and crop specific and less cumbersome. For soil health assessment chemical indicators must be integrated with physical and biological properties of the soils which can be predicted through reflectance spectroscopy. For assessing soil health related issues across different agro-ecoregions, there is however an urgent need for building-up more robust soil reflectance libraries.
Highlights
Agricultural policies associated with the Green Revolution have played a dominant role in enhancing the production of chemical fertilizers for meeting the nutrient needs of crops to boost their productivity
The impact of nutrient additions on the assemblages of mineral, soil organic matter constituents and soil organisms is complex. This is because the organisms involved in organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling and soil structure formation are themselves becoming the primary or secondary constituents of soil organic matter[16]
This approach has proved useful in increasing agricultural production, but its sole focus on fertilizer recommendation, ignores the physical and biological environment of the soils which significantly influence crop production
Summary
Agricultural policies associated with the Green Revolution have played a dominant role in enhancing the production of chemical fertilizers for meeting the nutrient needs of crops to boost their productivity. Farmers’ are not required to provide their indigenous knowledge on what ails their soils and how farm soils respond to management practices adopted in specific production systems This makes prognosis of the farm problems very difficult based on chemical tests alone. SHC scheme does not consider the physical and biological attributes of soils, which can influence the use efficiency of resource inputs in crop production, both positively and negatively It provides little information on the impact of specific nutrient management practices on soil health. The SHC scheme misses the vital connection to soil health vis-a-vis multiple ecosystem services provided by soils It is for these reasons, enhancing total food production without due diligence on soil degradation processes and ecosystem services, has been a fundamental flaw of the Indian strategy for food security under the new realities of climate change. Natural resources are showing multiple signs of fatigue and decline[17,23]
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