Soil compaction is one of the major problems facing modern agriculture. Overuse of machinery, intensive cropping, short crop rotations, intensive grazing and inappropriate soil management leads to compaction. Soil compaction occurs in a wide range of soils and climates. It is exacerbated by low soil organic matter content and use of tillage or grazing at high soil moisture content. Soil compaction increases soil strength and decreases soil physical fertility through decreasing storage and supply of water and nutrients, which leads to additional fertiliser requirement and increasing production cost. A detrimental sequence then occurs of reduced plant growth leading to lower inputs of fresh organic matter to the soil, reduced nutrient recycling and mineralisation, reduced activities of micro-organisms, and increased wear and tear on cultivation machinery. This paper reviews the work related to soil compaction, concentrating on research that has been published in the last 15 years. We discuss the nature and causes of soil compaction and the possible solutions suggested in the literature. Several approaches have been suggested to address the soil compaction problem, which should be applied according to the soil, environment and farming system. The following practical techniques have emerged on how to avoid, delay or prevent soil compaction: (a) reducing pressure on soil either by decreasing axle load and/or increasing the contact area of wheels with the soil; (b) working soil and allowing grazing at optimal soil moisture; (c) reducing the number of passes by farm machinery and the intensity and frequency of grazing; (d) confining traffic to certain areas of the field (controlled traffic); (e) increasing soil organic matter through retention of crop and pasture residues; (f) removing soil compaction by deep ripping in the presence of an aggregating agent; (g) crop rotations that include plants with deep, strong taproots; (h) maintenance of an appropriate base saturation ratio and complete nutrition to meet crop requirements to help the soil/crop system to resist harmful external stresses.

Soil compaction in cropping systems: A review of the nature, causes and possible solutions

https://www.ukm.my/ipi/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/70_2002_Consequences-of-climate-change-for-European-agricultural.pdf

Consequences of climate change for European agricultural productivity, land use and policy

Precision agriculture is the application of technologies and principles to manage spatial and temporal variability associated with all aspects of agricultural production for the purpose of improving crop performance and environmental quality. Success in precision agriculture is related to how well it can be applied to assess, manage, and evaluate the space-time continuum in crop production. This theme is used here to assess the current and potential capabilities of precision agriculture. Precision agriculture is technology enabled. It is through the integration of specific technologies that the potential is created to assess and manage variability at levels of detail never before obtainable and, when done correctly, at levels of quality never before achieved. The agronomic feasibility of precision agriculture has been intuitive, depending largely on the application of traditional management recommendations at finer scales, although new approaches are appearing. The agronomic success of precision agriculture has been limited and inconsistent although quite convincing in some cases, such as N management in sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.). Our analysis suggests prospects for current precision management increase as the degree of spatial dependence increases, but the degree of difficulty in achieving precision management increases with temporal variance. Thus, management parameters with high spatial dependence and low temporal variance (e.g., liming, P, and K) will be more easily managed precisely than those with large temporal variance (e.g., mobile insects). The potential for economic, environmental, and social benefits of precision agriculture is complex and largely unrealized because the space-time continuum of crop production has not been adequately addressed.

Aspects of precision agriculture

The remarkable complexity of soil and its importance to a wide range of ecosystem services presents major challenges to the modeling of soil processes. Although major progress in soil models has occurred in the last decades, models of soil processes remain disjointed between disciplines or ecosystem services, with considerable uncertainty remaining in the quality of predictions and several challenges that remain yet to be addressed. First, there is a need to improve exchange of knowledge and experience among the different disciplines in soil science and to reach out to other Earth science communities. Second, the community needs to develop a new generation of soil models based on a systemic approach comprising relevant physical, chemical, and biological processes to address critical knowledge gaps in our understanding of soil processes and their interactions. Overcoming these challenges will facilitate exchanges between soil modeling and climate, plant, and social science modeling communities. It will allow us to contribute to preserve and improve our assessment of ecosystem services and advance our understanding of climate-change feedback mechanisms, among others, thereby facilitating and strengthening communication among scientific disciplines and society. We review the role of modeling soil processes in quantifying key soil processes that shape ecosystem services, with a focus on provisioning and regulating services. We then identify key challenges in modeling soil processes, including the systematic incorporation of heterogeneity and uncertainty, the integration of data and models, and strategies for effective integration of knowledge on physical, chemical, and biological soil processes. We discuss how the soil modeling community could best interface with modern modeling activities in other disciplines, such as climate, ecology, and plant research, and how to weave novel observation and measurement techniques into soil models. We propose the establishment of an international soil modeling consortium to coherently advance soil modeling activities and foster communication with other Earth science disciplines. Such a consortium should promote soil modeling platforms and data repository for model development, calibration and intercomparison essential for addressing contemporary challenges.

/pdf/modeling-soil-processes-review-key-challenges-and-new-4a1lz21a4f.pdf

Modeling Soil Processes: Review, Key Challenges, and New Perspectives

Compaction of agricultural soils is a concern for many agricultural soil scientists and farmers since soil compaction, due to heavy field traffic, has resulted in yield reduction of most agronomic crops throughout the world. Soil compaction is a physical form of soil degradation that alters soil structure, limits water and air infiltration, and reduces root penetration in the soil. Consequences of soil compaction are still underestimated. A complete understanding of processes involved in soil compaction is necessary to meet the future global challenge of food security. We review here the advances in understanding, quantification, and prediction of the effects of soil compaction. We found the following major points: (1) When a soil is exposed to a vehicular traffic load, soil water contents, soil texture and structure, and soil organic matter are the three main factors which determine the degree of compactness in that soil. (2) Soil compaction has direct effects on soil physical properties such as bulk density, strength, and porosity; therefore, these parameters can be used to quantify the soil compactness. (3) Modified soil physical properties due to soil compaction can alter elements mobility and change nitrogen and carbon cycles in favour of more emissions of greenhouse gases under wet conditions. (4) Severe soil compaction induces root deformation, stunted shoot growth, late germination, low germination rate, and high mortality rate. (5) Soil compaction decreases soil biodiversity by decreasing microbial biomass, enzymatic activity, soil fauna, and ground flora. (6) Boussinesq equations and finite element method models, that predict the effects of the soil compaction, are restricted to elastic domain and do not consider existence of preferential paths of stress propagation and localization of deformation in compacted soils. (7) Recent advances in physics of granular media and soil mechanics relevant to soil compaction should be used to progress in modelling soil compaction.

/pdf/soil-compaction-impact-and-modelling-a-review-37n90quuou.pdf

Soil compaction impact and modelling. A review

Summary There is widespread evidence for the prevalence of problems in crop production which are attributable to soil compaction caused by the passage of vehicles, implements and draft animals. Agricultural, horticultural and forestry crops are known to experience these problems in both temperate and tropical regions. Soil compaction problems were experienced in commercial production long before any coherent research was undertaken on this subject. During the early part of the 19th century, draft animals were observed to cause soil compaction during cultivation, while during the second half of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries the use of steam engines for cultivation was accompanied by excessive compaction, unless cable traction was employed or soils were extremely dry. The introduction of the internal combustion engine for small tractors did not initially lead to widespread compaction problems but by the middle of the 20th century, and particularly during the past 30 years, mechanization has advanced to such a scale and intensity that compaction problems have become of worldwide importance. Soil compaction is now considered to be a multi-disciplinary problem in which machine/soil/crop/weather interactions play an important role and which may have dramatic economic and environmental consequences in world agriculture. However, recent progress in scientific understanding of the soil compaction process and its implications, improved insight into proper vehicle use and soil management, and the development of mechanization systems and novel running gear, provide new perspectives for reducing soil compaction problems in crop production.

Soil Compaction Problems in World Agriculture

Summary Soil compaction has been estimated to be responsible for the degradation of an area of 83 million ha world-wide, of which 33 million ha lies in Europe and 18 million ha in Africa. Soil compaction problems are of economic importance in the production of a wide range of crops throughout the world. Current research on this subject is leading to a greater understanding of the soil/machine/crop/weather interactions, which strongly influence the incidence and severity of these problems. Modifications to vehicles, their running gear and their management systems, have been shown to offer opportunities to reduce greatly the incidence of compaction problems. However, as yet the commercial uptake of these techniques is at a rudimentary level. There is a pressing need to adopt a more rigorous approach to the conduct of basic research and to extend the use and validation of models to predict soil, crop, environmental and economic responses to different systems of machinery management for a range of crops, soils and weather conditions.

Conclusions and recommendations for further research on soil compaction in crop production.

The role of field traffic studies in soil management research.

Conclusions of the ISTRO Workshop on "The effect of soil compaction on physical, chemical and biological factors in the environment", 25 August 1993, Melitipol, Ukraine

Summary Accurate predictions of the net economic benefits to be gained from the adoption of modifications to vehicles and their running gear are required if compaction problems in commercial crop production are to be overcome. The modifications most readily available to the farmer are: (1) reduction of load on running gear; (2) reduction of ground contact pressure by using wider tires or additional wheels and axles; (3) reduction in the area of fields subjected to traffic, particularly when soils are wet. The likely economic success of these options will depend closely on farm and vehicle size. Apart from the need to quantify, in economic terms, the benefits in crop yield and quality from such changes in management, it is essential to identify and evaluate all primary and secondary costs. Site factors, such as soil type, cultivation system, rainfall, cropping system and farm size, are likely to have a profound influence on the economics of the system. The extrapolation of experimental data obtained on small plots to a farm-scale basis requires great caution, due to the dominant influence of vehicle traffic distribution on overall changes in soil compactness. A number of computer-based models, capable of analysing the whole-farm economic responses to changes in machinery management, have been developed in Canada, the U.S.A. and Sweden. Such models are powerful tools for exploring the multi-factorial interactions between the numerous machinery options and site factors, but there is a shortage of accurate data to verify predictions.

Economics of Modifying Conventional Vehicles and Running Gear to Minimize Soil Compaction

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