Fertility
Loess tends to develop into very rich soils. Under appropriate climatic conditions it is some of the most agriculturally productive terrain in the world.
Soils underlain by loess tend to be excessively drained. The fine grains weather rapidly due to their large surface area making soils derived from loess very rich. One theory states that the fertility of loess soils is due largely to cation exchange capacity (the ability of plants to absorb nutrients from the soil) and porosity (the air-filled space in the soil). The fertility of Loess is not due to organic matter content, which tends to be rather low, unlike tropical soils which derive their fertility almost wholly from organic matter.
Even well managed loess farmland can experience dramatic erosion of well over 2.5 kg per square meter per year. Although in geological time loess has an incredible rate of erosion, in a more human time scale loess is durable and resistant to maltreatment. In China loess deposits along the Yellow River have been farmed and have produced phenomenal yields for over one thousand years. A large amount of the credit for this goes to the farmers; Chinese farmers were the first to practice active erosion control. The largest deposit of loess in the United States, the Loess Hills along the border of Iowa and Nebraska, has survived intensive farming and poor farming practices. For almost 150 years this loess deposit was farmed with mouldboard ploughs and fall tilled, both intensely erosive. At times it suffered erosion rates of over 10 kilograms per square meter per year. Today this loess deposit is worked as low till or no till in all areas and is aggressively terraced.
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