Soil works as a physical support and contains all the nutrients that plants need to grow. Each kind of crop requires a specific type of soil. In order to provide the best conditions for plants to grow, techniques such as tillage, use of pesticides and fertilization are used continually in agriculture.
However, these techniques to increase production can change the soil structure in different aspects, causing problems such as contamination, erosion and degradation. For example, the AgWeb powered by Farm Journal has demonstrated the decrease of healthy in similar soils managed by two different farmers in central Illinois. One of them is constantly practicing tillage before producing soybean and the other farmer did not till for 30 years. In the first case, the constant use of tillage has caused erosion and made hard the movement of water in soil pores that were compressed with time. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln extension program described some of the impacts of the tillage operation on soils in large scale of time, some of them are the break of soil structure and destruction of residue.
The structure of soil is essential to provide the best conditions for mineral uptake by plants and physical support. Continuing impacts on soil structure can change its properties and, in consequence, make it difficult to be used for agriculture. In the cases that happened in Illinois, the farmer that had the unhealthiest soil started to change the treatment in his land with no-till and analysis that guided him about how to improve soil pH and in about 5 years it was possible to recognize an improvement in the soil quality.
It is known that conservative activities on soil for agriculture are not easy to achieve, but with studies and development of sustainable technologies it is possible to restore soils that were impacted by damaging agricultural treatments in order to continue the production of food.
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