A soil's capacity to keep feeding crops: its stock of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and trace nutrients, its organic matter and the living community that cycles them, its structure and water-holding. Every fertility practice in this atlas, rotation, manure, compost, cover crops, synthetic fertilizer, is a way of paying back what harvests remove, and exhausted fertility is the quiet cause behind abandoned fields from Mesopotamia onward. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Origin YearDated to Justus von Liebig's 1840 Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, which displaced the humus theory with the mineral theory of plant nutrition and founded the scientific study of soil fertility. Classification
Concept ClassSoil and Environmental Processes 1 Connections
Associated With
Source Haber Process (Wikipedia)
Bioavailable nitrogen from fixation is one of soil fertility's own components
Source Nitrogen Fixation (Wikipedia)
Rothamsted Research runs the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment, the world's longest-running soil fertility experiment.
A long fallow is what lets the practice rebuild soil fertility between crops
Source Wikipedia: Shifting cultivation
Soil Erosion, Concepts Lost topsoil is lost fertility; the two concepts describe the same ground from opposite directions
Source Soil Erosion (Wikipedia)
In Discipline
Source Soil Fertility (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Soil Fertility (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation- History section
lead description (concept-class)
A soil's capacity to keep feeding crops: its stock of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and trace nutrients, its organic matter and the living community that cycles them, its structure and water-holding.
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