Conclusions and Recommendations for Further Research on Soil Compaction in Crop Production

Abstract

Soil compaction has been estimated to be responsible for the degradation of an area of 83 million ha world-wide, of which 33 million ha lies in Europe and 18 million ha in Africa. Soil compaction problems are of economic importance in the production of a wide range of crops throughout the world. Current research on this subject is leading to a greater understanding of the soil/machine/crop/weather interactions, which strongly influence the incidence and severity of these problems. Modifications to vehicles, their running gear and their management systems, have been shown to offer opportunities to reduce greatly the incidence of compaction problems. However, as yet the commercial uptake of these techniques is at a rudimentary level. There is a pressing need to adopt a more rigorous approach to the conduct of basic research and to extend the use and validation of models to predict soil, crop, environmental and economic responses to different systems of machinery management for a range of crops, soils and weather conditions.