Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agronomy, Vol. LXIV, Issue 1
Written by Iulian Bogdan MUȘAT, Roxana CICEOI, Marian MUȘAT, Mircea MIHALACHE
The last decades made obvious that the life on Earth depends on the health status of our soils. The EU is committed to ensure that land is managed sustainably, and soils are protected or remediated according to their needs. The recently launched EU Green Deal puts soil in the heart of the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies, with important targets to be reached by 2030. Therefore, research on how soil management practices affect the soil quality is required by relevant actors, sectors, and policy fields. The present work presents a comparative study on the changes of physical properties of soils in the southern part of Romania, under two different soil tillage practices: scarification (9 years, at 45 cm depth) and shallow plowing (25 cm) followed by disking. The two soil profiles from Calinesti, Teleorman County and Bucu, Ialomita County, revealed a chromic luvisols (luvisols class) in the Calinesti site and a calcaric fluvisols (protisols class) in the Bucu site. The formation conditions of the two types of soil are quite different in the terms of parental material, climate, vegetation, relief, anthropogenic influence, etc. Following the analysis of the physical properties (bulk density, total porosity, and degree of compaction) of the two soil types, evident differences were found, with implications in the crop yields.
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