Soil erosion and management strategies

Abstract

Rising population and decreasing cultivable land pose a great challenge to modern agriculture. The agricultural production has to be balanced with the ever-increasing population to meet the demands of food supply. These changes have led to intensification of agriculture resulting into conversion of natural vegetation areas to agricultural land. This continued overexploitation of land resources in combination with climatic factors results in removal of the top fertile layer of soil. On the global scale, the period of the earliest significant change in land use corresponds to a first wave of the soil erosion. The areas with human intervention have high rate of soil erosion of 2.92 tha-1 year-1. In order to strike a balance between agricultural output and conservation, soil erosion control becomes very essential component. The control and prevention of soil erosion necessitate the development of an integral soil erosion control system with the incorporating methods based on the engineering, agricultural cultivation technology, law enforcement, biological methods, land planning, and management. Soil conservation structures along with advanced soil loss models would be prerequisite toward land management. This chapter addresses the dynamics of erosion and agricultural sustainability through different soil management strategies, which poses challenges similar to those of quantification of future changes in climate or agricultural systems. The chapter is focused on the analyzing and quantifying the effects of changes in land use and management of the eroded soils in the agriculture.