Organic amendments as sustainable tool to recovery fertility in intensive agricultural systems

By R. Scotti, Giuliano Bonanomi, R. Scelza, A. Zoina, M. Rao. 2015

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intensive agriculture is a farming system characterised by a large use of inputs, causing a large pressure on the environment. As peculiar and efficient example of intensive agriculture cultivation under plastic tunnels provides several advantages for farmers due to improvement of microclimatic conditions coupled with a relatively low investment costs. In the Mediterranean Basin such cultivation systems reach about 200,000 ha mainly in Spain, Turkey, Italy, and Morocco. As downside, intensive agriculture negatively affects soil fertility principally because of a loss in soil organic matter. Sustainable practices providing organic amendments could be a useful tool to maintain or increase organic matter content in agricultural soils, preserving and improving soil fertility. An improved knowledge of management factors affecting soil quality is crucial to plan farming systems that effectively maintain soil fertility. Therefore, this review focuses on the potential value of organic amendments in the recovery of soil fertility, in particular in sites under plastic cover intensive farming system. Following a brief overview of the effects of intensive agriculture on soil, the review describes various organic amendments used in agriculture and their benefits on soil fertility, to conclude with the need, in the future researches, to identify organic amendments able to maximize a recovery of soil fertility.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99342f11bf3377a7fce87dc25d556bf71feb8553

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. E. Blagodatskaya
2. Y. Kuzyakov

In Soil Science

1. Y. Kuzyakov
2. E. Blagodatskaya
3. B. Razavi
4. M. Zarebanadkouki
5. Shibin Liu
6. J. Pausch
7. W. Cheng
8. A. Gunina

Citations in the corpus

• Spatio-temporal patterns of enzyme activities after manure application reflect mechanisms of niche differentiation between plants and microorganisms (2017, background): “Livestock manure application has been widely accepted as a sustainable management practice in agriculture, providing environmentally and agronomically sound outcomes (Risse et al., 2006; Brandjes et al., 1996; Scotti et al., 2015).”