The soil, its metabolism, nutrients cycling and agroecological practices

Abstract

The approach is to look the soil as a living system and to ground its participation in the agro ecosystem sustainability. It goes from Altieri’s premise that identifies soil quality and biodiversity up and down the soil as pillars to get the change of the conventional production systems (characterized by monocultures and dependence of industrial synthesis ingredients) through diversified and self-sufficient systems.

It comes the organization pattern analysis, structure and processes which characterized the soil and under the systemic approach, it justifies how this system from which the plants make part of, and the rest of the organisms, gives the nutrients for their requirements, and those also form the living and no living biomass system, which is recycled continuously transforming in a permanent way the webs and soil components, traveling to the atmosphere as molecules and gases like CO₂, CH₄, N₂O, named “green house” effect gases (GHEG) and others like H₂S, involved in the acid rain.

The systemic vision of webs within webs and context processes take us to fertility, resilience, and health and soil quality as emerging properties, only explainable from the whole agro ecosystem. Some agro ecological practices like the preservation and use of the organic matter, zero or minimal tillage and the biodiversity (with its connections up-down and down-up) same as the organization of the complex agro ecosystems, have their scientific base on the web framework which is weaved around of the components and go beyond the ecosystem and the agro ecosystem. Therefore, the need of those agro ecological practices become widespread, covering the local, regional and territorial, through the social, economic and political networks.