Soil Case Study

Soil is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. The Earth's body of soil is the pedosphere, which has four important functions: it is a medium for plant growth; it is a means of water storage, supply and purification; it is a modifier of Earth's atmosphere; it is a habitat for organisms; all of which, in turn, modify the soil. Soils have many different properties, including texture, structure or architecture, water holding capacity and pH (whether the soils are acid or alkaline). These properties combine to make soils useful for a wide range of purposes. Soil properties govern what type of plants grows in a soil or what particular crops grow in a region.

Soil is a natural landscape resource that supports plants and animal life. However, its properties vary over time and space. Soil variability is a product of soil-forming factors that interact over a continuum of temporal and spatial scales. Soil variability could be spatial or temporal; however, spatial variability is often larger (Dahiya, et al., 1984), and relates to variations

Its feasibility is based on the knowledge of the effects of management practices on soil properties, and how they affect soil-crop-water relations (Heluf and Wakene, 2006). Therefore, characterization and/or evaluation of soil properties is a master key for describing and understanding the status and qualities of the major nutrients in soils (Geissen et al., 2009). Assessing soil physicochemical properties are used to understand the potential status of nutrients in soils of different land uses (Wondowosen and Sheleme, 2011). This knowledge can ascertains whether the specified land use types are useful for a given production system and used to meet plants requirement for rapid growth and better crops production (Shishir and Sah,