Assessment of land quality and soil fertility for planning farming systems and agrotechnologies

Soil quality is considered to be the key element in the system of the agroecological assessment of lands. Soil quality is characterized by a combination of conditions ensuring sustainable crop yields and determining the ecological functions and stability of agrolandscapes. Soil conditions, i.e., the character of soilscapes and the soil quality, are integrated with all the other agroecological conditions in the system of land assessment. The soil quality reflects the integral effect of soil properties on the yield and quality of particular crops under certain climatic and landscape conditions and the level of agriculture; the ecological functions of soils are also taken into account. The productive capacity of agricultural land is the integral criterion of land quality; it is characterized by the yield of crops of particular quality at the given levels of agriculture intensity, energy inputs, and economic efficiency.