Cropping
Vermiculite The mineral that boosts
soils and crop yields
Food is essential for life. But despite major
efforts to alleviate food shortage and
outright hunger of millions of people, there
are still approximately 800 million
individuals who go to bed with empty
stomachs every night.
e need to feed approximately 9 to 10
billion people during the middle of the 21st
century will put increasing pressure on land
resources and it is obvious that the
production of food will have to rise to keep
pace with rising food demands. e per
capita food production is still declining in
some parts of the world, for example in SubSaharan Africa.
One of the biophysical root causes of
falling per capita food production is the
declining quality and quantity of the land
resource base, in particular the soil. Soils,
the foundation for survival and food
November - December 2016
security, are increasingly over-exploited in
some parts of the world. In order to reverse
this trend of land and soil degradation it is
necessary to either expand the land base
under cultivation or to intensify crop
production per unit of land.
But even if the land base is extended,
most of the additional land that would be
brought into cultivation is of lower quality
and at risk for soil degradation. Clearly, the
declining soil quantity and quality in large
parts of the developing world poses a threat
to food security.
Some land has inherently low fertility
because of the soils overly infertile rock
formations. Other land is made less fertile
due to human intervention, such as the
extraction of nutrients through harvesting
and other exports without replenishing
the extracted soil nutrients. In some parts
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REVIEW AFRICA
of Africa the soils are degraded, eroded and
successively mined of their nutrients.
Nutrients are essential for plant growth.
From the 18 elements essential for higher
plants, all of them, with the exception of
nitrogen, are derived from naturally
occurring rocks and minerals
ere are several ways to enhance and
maintain the health of the soil basis. e
application of so-called agrogeological
practices is only one of the biophysical
instruments that are used to tackle long-term
soils related problems.
Agrogeology, or the use of rocks for
crops, is an interdisciplinary approach that
aims to study geological processes and
natural rock and mineral materials that
contribute to the maintenance of agroecosystems 1995. It is an applied, problemsolving, interdisciplinar y earth and
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