Man and Agriculture: Manipulating Soil – Plant Interactions

Abstract

Plants manipulate soils and rocks debris to stabilize and produce clays that form good properties to their benefit. Without plant there would be no soil i.e. association of organic matter and clay minerals. This stabilizing influence and the ecological interactions between rocks, silicate minerals, clays, organic matter and micro-organisms is the basis of plant life on the surface of the earth. Animals live from plant material, either first hand (herbivores for example) or second hand (lions, jackals and other hunters). The trick is to use the ecology of plant actions to produce vegetal material for direct consumption (wheat for example) or for the production of meat (cattle and other meat animals). Man needed to understand how to manipulate the original manipulators, how to use the natural tendencies and inter-relations of plant and soil materials in order to become less dependent on the vagaries of nature. This chapter gives a brief resume of the steps of plant manipulation related to soils constraints and the eventual impact of agriculture on the soil materials, especially the clay minerals.