Pedotechnique applications in large-scale farming: Economic value, soil ecosystems services and soil security

Highlights

• Pedotechniques are used to create soils suitable for table grape cultivation.

• Soil transformation allow for highest productivity and higher profitability

• Pedotechniques could cause decline of soil ecosystem services and soil security.

• Soil science should focus even more on economic value of soil ecosystem services.

Abstract

Since ancient times Humans and Soil have experienced interwoven links. Nowadays soil scientists continue to stress such links highlighting the importance of soil in: i) satisfying the ever growing Human demand for food, water and energy, and ii) providing ecosystem services that mitigate climate changes, influence human health and improve biodiversity.

Pedotechniques are recently used to generate soils suitable for table grape cultivation in order to increase productivity and grape quality, thus to get substantial financial returns. We show one emblematic study case of pedotechniques applied in Sicily (Italy). Aims of the investigation were: i) stressing threats to soil security derived by the generation of anthropogenic soils, ii) assessing the economic sustainability of pedotechniques and table grape production, taking into consideration only the internal factors and excluding the external economic contributions that are allocated to social sustainability and iii) stressing the role of soil science to focus on “economic value” to the soil ecosystem services and degradation processes.

Results highlight that soil transformations allow for considerable investment costs. The highest productivity and the consequent higher profitability of the cultivation amortize the start-up costs. From the other side transformations could trigger considerable deterioration of both soil ecosystem services and environmental quality. In order to stress this last aspect and to define the relationships between pedotechnique application and soil security we have considered the five soil security dimensions (i.e. capability, condition, capital, connectivity and codification).

Introduction

In June 1955, the Wenner-Gren Foundation (http://www.wennergren.org/) sponsored an international symposium on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” (AA VV, 1956). Seventy scholars - from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia - attended the symposium that used examples from Europe, the United States and the Middle East to show the more and more negative influence of humans on earth. The inspiration for the symposium came from the George P. Marsh's book titled Man and Nature (1864). Marsh mostly focused on deforestation, soil erosion and desertification as well as the environmental effects of urbanization and industrialization, the disposal of wastes, and the human impact on the atmosphere. The symposium organisers recognized Marsh's importance in alerting the public opinion on the consequences of human modifications of nature.

Notwithstanding these premises, the damage to the primary resources was fully recognized from the 1980s (Bouma and McBratney, 2013; Stolte et al., 2015; Dazzi and Lo Papa, 2016). As far concern the soils, in particular, starting from those years the anthropic pressure on the soilscapes was so strong to lead to an evident decrease of soil diversity (Ibáñez et al., 1995; Lo Papa and Dazzi, 2013; Lo Papa et al., 2011).

The concept of soil diversity (Ibáñez et al., 1990, Ibáñez et al., 1995) was recently coupled with the concept of soil security (Koch et al., 2012, Koch et al., 2013; McBratney et al., 2014). This last considers the maintenance and improvement of the soil's capacity to produce food, fibre and freshwater, to contribute to energy and climate sustainability, and to maintain the biodiversity and the overall protection of the ecosystem (Bouma and McBratney, 2013). Soil security depends on the soil's ecosystem services (ES), i.e. the benefit that people derive from soils (Dominati et al., 2010), which, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA, 2005) could be grouped in four categories (Provisioning services; Regulating services; Cultural services; Supporting functions).

As far as concern the ES, several economic evaluation have been developed (Jónsson and Davíðsdóttir, 2016) and most of them are standardized into a currency called international dollars (de Groot et al., 2012). Also soil security should involve an economic evaluation with the final aim of encouraging a sound soil management (FAO, 2017) that, forming one of the main goal of pedotechnique, a branch of soil science that consider the effect of soil handling on the soil qualities (Van Ouwerkerk and Koolen, 1988), strongly influences the soil's ecosystem services.

However, in applying pedotechnique, farmers always tend to increase their income and not to avoid threats to the soils that might occur during the handling of earthy materials (Dazzi et al., 2009).

This work considers one of the recent problems in soil science research: the consequences of the anthropogenic actions in terms of soil degradation and their adverse impact on ecosystem services and soil security, particularly when farmers apply pedotechniques to increase agricultural production in a short time span. Such concern generates a dilemma: how to guarantee soil security and assure soil's ecosystem services in areas strongly influenced by humans who generate anthropogenic soils due to pedotechnique applications?

To try to give a solution to this dilemma, we took into consideration a particularly meaningful case study (one of the many) that recently (Lo Papa et al., 2018) we surveyed in the central south part of Sicily (Italy). The analysis of the case study aims also i) to verify the feasibility and the profitability of an investment of a pedotechnique application in a firm producing table grapes as an alternative to cereal crops traditionally diffused on Vertisols; ii) and to highlight the influence on soil security of the pedotechnique application.