Charting the Future for Soil Management with An Eye to Our History.

Global climate change dictates that we must further our understanding of how environments interact with soils and cropping systems.  Over the past 150 years soil management research changed from experiments focused on the “system” to an increasingly reductionist approach.  Reductionism focuses on understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things.  Obviously, our science has advanced greatly using this approach.  We must ask, however, how has “reductionism” affected the application of information derived from our field research?  This approach has led to: (1) more narrowly focused experiments; (2) less linkage between experiments; and (3) ultimately, a scaling down with little consideration of the “system” at all.  Many of us have fallen into the trap of “reductionist research” at the expense of viewing the “system”.  Fortunately in the last 25-year period there have been attempts to move away from the reductionist approach.  This presentation will illustrate the benefits of simultaneously studying the interactive impacts of climate, soil, and cropping system using an example from the Great Plains region of the United States.  It is our opinion that future research must increasingly address soil management issues from a “landscape” perspective.  The great advances in GPS technology give us an increasing capability to study soil and crop management systems on a broad landscape scale; an opportunity that we did not previously have.  The enigma of climate change should spur us to concentrate on furthering our understanding of how climatic environments interact with soils and cropping systems.