Achieving Good Farm Practice through Improved Soil,Nutrient and Land Managment

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