Aspects
The term soil health is used to assess the ability of a soil to:
- Sustain plant and animal productivity and diversity;
- Maintain or enhance water and air quality;
- Support human health and habitation
The underlying principle in the use of the term “soil health” is that soil is not just a growing medium, rather it is a living, dynamic and ever-so-subtly changing environment. We can use the human health analogy and categorise a healthy soil as one:
- In a state of composite well-being in terms of biological, chemical and physical properties;
- Not diseased or infirmed (i.e. not degraded, nor degrading), nor causing negative off-site impacts;
- With each of its qualities cooperatively functioning such that the soil reaches its full potential and resists degradation;
- Providing a full range of functions (especially nutrient, carbon and water cycling) and in such a way that it maintains this capacity into the future.
Read more about this topic: Soil Health
Famous quotes containing the word aspects:
“It is always a sign of an unproductive time when it concerns itself with petty and technical aspects [in philology], and likewise it is a sign of an unproductive person to pursue such trifles.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“All the aspects of this desert are beautiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each slight inequality and track is so distinctly revealed; and when your eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment ...”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)