What Is Adaptive Landscape Farming

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

We would like to acquaint farmers, gardeners and vegetable growers - all lovers of summer cottage farming with new scientific achievements. The largest development of recent years is the adaptive landscape farming system, which will be discussed now.

Adaptive landscape agriculture is developed with reference to a specific landscape, i.e. it must be adapted to specific natural resources. This new direction in agriculture is described in the literature in relation to large landowners. We have small plots of land, so we will try to adapt all these scientific achievements to farm or dacha farming. Of course, we do not have unmanned aerial vehicles, combines and other mechanisms, but this does not prevent us from mastering the basics of this new doctrine in full.

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A few words about the terms used in adaptive landscape agriculture. A landscape is a natural-territorial complex, which is a separate area of the earth's surface, which has a common geological foundation, one type of relief, the same climate, and is characterized by genetic unity and close interconnection of all its components.

Agrolandscape is a part of the natural landscape, identified according to the leading agroecological factors and intended for organizing the production of agricultural crops and meeting the needs of a person and a family. In other words, this is just your summer cottage or farm plot of land as part of the entire surrounding natural-territorial complex.

In conventional farming, fertilizer doses, for example, were determined based on recommendations, instructions written on the fertilizer bag, or agrochemical analysis of one average soil sample from the entire plot. With adaptive landscape farming, this will not be enough, it will be necessary to conduct an agrochemical analysis of the soil from each square meter, draw up a detailed cartogram of soil fertility, and only then proceed to determine the doses of fertilizers to be applied separately for each square meter. Thus, the adaptive landscape farming system takes into account the smallest changes in the natural environment - in the agricultural landscape.

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The new system should take into account all the subtleties of the soil and climatic conditions of a particular site. The climate of the region in which we live is characterized by a high hydrothermal coefficient, i.e. a significant excess of precipitation over the value of total evaporation. This determines the "leaching" type of water regime of our soils, which, in combination with the effect of acidic decomposition products of organic matter, led to the formation of podzolic soils prevailing in the region. …

In our region, there is also a high probability of waterlogging or dry weather in May and June, which makes it necessary to use moisture-saving measures in agriculture and carefully justify land reclamation or apply drainage and moisture measures.

The region also has complex relief forms, where stony (boulder) loams, sandy loams and sands, as well as various deposits of melt glacial waters - from pebble sands to thin silty layered clays act as surface parent rocks. This is a reflection of specific landscape natural conditions, which are taken into account in the most essential way in the formation of adaptive landscape agriculture.

Adaptive landscape agriculture consists of seven main agricultural and plant growing components (elements):

• new organization of the garden area;
• clear structure of crops (crop rotations);
• modern technologies for the cultivation of agricultural crops;
• selection of seeds and varieties;
• new calculation of fertilizer doses and methods of their use;
• mandatory use of plant protection products;
• adaptive tillage.

To implement all these constituent elements of agriculture, it will first be necessary to obtain detailed initial information (the so-called "input information") about soil-climatic, material-technical, organizational-economic, financial-price, moral-psychological and social factors that determine the effectiveness of adaptive landscape farming. At the “output” of the system will be the obtained agricultural products, their quality, the degree of reproduction of soil fertility and the impact of our activities on the environment.

Read the next part. Components of an adaptive landscape farming system →

Read all parts of the article about adaptive landscape farming:

• What is adaptive landscape farming

• Components of an adaptive landscape farming system

• Devices and methods in an adaptive landscape farming system

• Summer cottage farming: mapping fields, observing crop rotation

• Determining the structure of crops and crop rotations

• Fertilizer system as a basic element of summer cottage farming

• What fertilizers are needed for various vegetable crops

• Tillage systems

• Technologies of adaptive landscape farming system

• Black and pure fallow