Question

What is the significance of climatic and soil requirements in crop production?
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Answer 1

Soil is a critical part of successful agriculture and is the original source of the nutrients that we use to grow crops. The nutrients move from the soil into plants that we eat like tomatoes. Nutrients are also a part of the food animals (like cows) eat. In the end, we benefit from healthy soil.

Answer 2

Answer:

Explanation:

most important ecosystem service delivered by agriculture is the provision of food, feed and fibres.

The extent to which this provisioning depends on external production inputs is a fundamental issue. Agricultural ecosystems have evolved under human management. To obtain greatest possible production from the landscape, agricultural communities have developed and maintained ecosystems at their early succession state. The human selection pressure has favoured readably harvestable crops with high net production and it has penalized biomass production and accumulation on the landscape.

Since the Green Revolution, mainstreamed agriculture has mainly involved controlling crop varieties and their genetics; soil fertility through the application of chemical fertilizers; and pests with chemical pesticides. The impact of this form of agriculture on the environment has been severe. There has been a significant simplification and homogenization of the world’s ecosystems. Maize, wheat, rice and barley, which were once rare plants, have become the dominant crops on earth and staples in human diets (FAOSTAT, 2014). Soil degradation is another critical concern. In agricultural ecosystems depleted of soil organic carbon, it will be increasingly difficult to produce higher yields. Each year, soil erosion destroys 10 million hectares of cropland. Forty percent of this loss is due to tillage erosion (Pimentel, 2006). In soils that have already experienced significant losses of soil organic matter, increased fertilization does not usually generate a net sink for carbon, because the production, transport and application of fertilizer releases higher amounts of carbon dioxide (Corsi et al., 2012)