Books:
This practical book combines soil management information and strategies with a theoretical understanding of soil development and creation. Green manures, crop rotations, and soil amendments are discussed alongside descriptions of the processes involved in building soil and the temporal scales of soil quality. The book provides a lens through which soil loss can be appreciated by expressing the special characteristics of soils as unique organisms.
This book talks about how rich soils develop over time and how humans affect changes in soil. Half of the book discusses the development of soils in the humid subtropics and tropics and the other half on time, development and land use. The book explores a highly weathered soil at the Calhoun Forest in South Carolina. Changes in the soil are traced from the Devonian to the Holocene, through cotton agriculture in the early 1800s to the Civil War, to abandonment and planting with pine trees in the mid 1900s.
This book looks at the issue of introducing soil conservation and innovations in afforestation on a sustainable basis in rural Ethiopia. This book attempts to answer why a major conservation program introduced and implemented in Ethiopia during the twenty years of the Derg regime failed to induce the changes in land use and management practices that it sought to bring about, and why it was not sustained by indigenous farmers. The search for an explanation of the failure of the program-induced adoption of soil conservation and innovations in afforestation focuses on four areas: the existence or absence of indigenous conservation-oriented land use and management, the manner in which the program was implemented, the balance sheet of its benefits and short-comings, and the property rights conditions under which the program was promoted. The contribution of this last factor is systematically examined and weighed, separately as well as in conjunction with other factors.
This book seeks to forever change the way we view soil and its importance in our lives. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute comments, "Read this book. You'll know more about that which you are made of and which is essential to all of life on the land part of the planet than you thought imaginable."
This classic alternative agriculture text tells the story of a young Japanese microbiologist specializing in plant diseases who began to question the fundamental principles of modern agriculture. Recognizing the degeneration of Japanese farmland, Fukuoka left his technical career to develop his version of traditional Japanese farming at a time when most Japanese had abandoned their methods of working closely with the land in favor of the American model of economic and industrial development. Fukuoka’s natural farming method requires less labor and less disruption of nature than any other, while maintaining the same yields per acre as his farmer neighbors. A fascinating read, Fukuoka understands the interconnections of farming with other aspects of culture and nature.
An interesting resource book for a soil scientist or just somebody interested in soils! The text discuss soil surveys, soil systematics, the examination and description of soils, mapping techniques, information on recording and management of soils.
This book puts desertification and land degradation in a non-crisis perspective, that is, it unmasks a lot of development rhetoric, and takes a close look at what is actually happening 'on the ground' in many situations, to warrant the title 'desertification'. The book's chapters cover institutional, causal -biophysical, political, and ecosystem-related approaches to land degradation in arid countries.