Restoring Soil Fertility on Degraded Lands to Meet Food, Fuel, and Climate Security Needs via Perennialization

Samantha Mosier,S Carolina Córdova,G Philip Robertson

doi:10.3389/fsufs.2021.706142

Abstract

A continuously growing pressure to increase food, fiber, and fuel production to meet worldwide demand and achieve zero hunger has put severe pressure on soil resources. Abandoned, degraded, and marginal lands with significant agricultural constraints—many still used for agricultural production—result from inappropriately intensive management, insufficient attention to soil conservation, and climate change. Continued use for agricultural production will often require ever more external inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides, further exacerbating soil degradation and impeding nutrient recycling and retention. Growing evidence suggests that degraded lands have a large potential for restoration, perhaps most effectively via perennial cropping systems that can simultaneously provide additional ecosystem services. Here we synthesize the advantages of and potentials for using perennial vegetation to restore soil fertility on degraded croplands, by summarizing the principal mechanisms underpinning soil carbon stabilization and nitrogen and phosphorus availability and retention. We illustrate restoration potentials with example systems that deliver climate mitigation (cellulosic bioenergy), animal production (intensive rotational grazing), and biodiversity conservation (natural ecological succession). Perennialization has substantial promise for restoring fertility to degraded croplands, helping to meet future food security needs.

Highlights

The continuously growing pressure on agricultural lands to increase food production has severely tested their capacity to produce agricultural products at an acceptable environmental cost
To illustrate the mechanisms underpinning perennialization’s impact on soil fertility restoration we describe below three potential management systems that differ in intensity, impact, and time to full restoration, broadly illustrating three overarching uses—climate change mitigation, animal protein production, and biodiversity restoration
There is an abundance of degraded land in the world in need of soil fertility restoration to meet current and future food security needs

Summary

Introduction

The continuously growing pressure on agricultural lands to increase food production has severely tested their capacity to produce agricultural products at an acceptable environmental cost. Perennial vegetation offer forage that can often be more productive (Minns et al, 2001; Moore et al, 2004; Skinner et al, 2004) and available for a greater proportion of the growing season (Ferchaud et al, 2016) compared to grazing systems that rely heavily on annually planted crops for year-round forage.

Results

Conclusion