Good farming practices maximize chances of a good harvest. In the past,
conventional farming practices treated entire farms as homogeneous units
even though they are often variable in productive potential. This view
is changing as technology allows producers to measure soil nutrient
status, crop potential, pasture health, and water-use efficiency at
specific sites within a field. ICTs like digital soil maps provide
extensive soil information that can be stored and accessed online. GPS,
satellite imagery, remote sensors, and aerial images help to assess soil
and land variations, and mobile applications and the Internet can
disseminate the information quickly.
Assessing Soil Properties for Climate-Resilient Agriculture
Accurate soil analyses and improved farming practices are needed
urgently because productivity gains are highest in healthy soils and
where pesticide, fertilizer, tools, and machinery are used properly.
Instruments for mapping and analyzing soil properties have proliferated
in the last decade, increasing farmers’ knowledge about the soils on
their farms and the need for climate-resilient agricultural practices.
The following section discusses these technologies and their associated
challenges in broad terms. Subsections discuss innovative technologies
specifically related to nitrogen and carbon, two essential chemical
components for successful soil conservation and climate change
mitigation.
Digital soil maps are the most promising applications for visualizing
soil properties and the gravity of soil nutrient depletion in a
particular area.2 The International Working Group on Digital
Soil Mapping (WG-DSM) defines digital soil mapping as “the creation and
the population of a geographically referenced soil database generated at
a given resolution by using field and laboratory observation methods
coupled with environmental data through quantitative relationships”
(Rossiter 2004). A variety of technologies, including satellite remote
sensors and cameras, can be used to survey soil and collect data to
create digital soil map