Comparing Soil Quality between Conventional and Organic Farming System in Pepper and Cabbage Field.

Soil conservation is an important issue in terms of preventing soil degradation and maintaining good soil quality. Especially, soil quality has a great impact on managing crop productivity. Main purpose of this research was to compare soil quality between two different cultivation practices: conventional and organic farming system. Pepper and cabbage were cultivated in the field with chemical fertilizer and pesticide for conventional farming system and only organic fertilizer for organic farming system. Soil samples were collected at the beginning and end of cultivation. Soil quality was estimated using soil quality index (SQI) based on soil chemical parameters: soil pH, electrical conductivity (EC), cation exchange capacity (CEC), soil organic matter (SOM), and available phosphate (P₂O₅). Result showed that average SQI was ranged in control (0.67), conventional system (0.57-0.71), and organic system (0.61-0.80) respectively. The highest SQI (0.80) was observed in the cabbage field after cultivation while the lowest SQI (0.57) was measured in the cabbage field when conventional cultivation was applied. For both pepper and cabbage, SQI was increased from 0.61 to 0.76 for pepper and from 0.74 to 0.80 for cabbage when organic farming system was applied in the field. Among varied soil chemical parameters, CEC and SOM had a high impact on increasing soil quality in organic farming system. In conclusion, applying organic farming system contribute to enhance CEC and SOM contents in soil and consequently, improve soil quality resulting increase of crop productivity. Overall, soil quality assessment is a useful tool to estimate crop productivity and more research is required for applying soil quality index to various soil functions.

Key words: Soil quality, Soil quality index, Organic farming, Soil conservation

*Corresponding author: Sung Chul Kim, sckim@cnu.ac.kr, Tel:+82-42-821-6737