Amyaz Moledina's List: Modeling soil quality and diversification decisions

Biodynamic farms had better soil quality and just as financial viable on a per acre basis.

Annual crop production in the Canadian prairies is undergoing significant change. Traditional monoculture cereal cropping systems, which rely on frequent summer-fallowing and use of mechanical tillage, are being replaced by extended and diversified crop rotations together with the use of conservation tillage (minimum and zero-tillage) practices. This paper reviews the findings of western Canadian empirical studies that have examined the economic forces behind these land use and soil tillage changes. The evidence suggests that including oilseed and pulse crops in the rotation with cereal grains contributes to higher and more stable net farm income in most soil–climatic regions, despite a requirement for increased expenditures on purchased inputs. In the very dry Brown soil zone and drier regions of the Dark Brown soil zone where the production risk with stubble cropping is high, the elimination of summer fallow from the cropping system may not be economically feasible under present and near-future economic conditions. The use of conservation tillage practices in the management of mixed cropping systems is highly profitable in the more moist Black and Gray soil zones (compared with conventional mechanical tillage methods) because of significant yield advantages and substantial resource savings that can be obtained by substituting herbicides for the large amount of tillage that is normally used. However, in the Brown soil zone and parts of the Dark Brown soil zone, the short-term economic benefits of using conservation tillage practices are more marginal and often less profitable than comparable conventional tillage practices.

Soil quality, or soil health, has been defined as “the capacity of a specific kind of soil to
function within natural or managed ecosystem boundaries to sustain plant and animal
productivity, maintain or enhance water and air quality, and support human health and habitation”
(Karlen et al., 1997) or, more simply, the ability of a soil to perform functions that are essential to
people and the environment (D. Karlen, personal communication, 2009). Whatever the specific
definition, the goal is to manage soils so as to assure long-term productive and environmental
sustainability. Soil does this by performing five essential functions: nutrient cycling, water
relations, biodiversity and habitat, filtering and buffering, and physical stability and support

Model of diversification in soil production.