Soil Quality Evaluation Of Urban Market Gardens.

In the U.S., urban agriculture (UA) has emerged as a desirable use for vacant land in post-industrial cities with declining populations. Urban market gardens, or farms, represent the largest scale of UA and have the potential to impact local economies and food security. This study was conducted with the central objective of characterizing soil quality (SQ) at nine urban market gardens in the cities of Cleveland and Youngstown, OH. Soil samples were collected during October 2012 and a suite of soil physical, chemical, and biological properties were measured.  A soil quality index (SQI) was generated for each site by scoring soil property measurements with the soil management assessment framework (SMAF). SQI values for the urban market garden sites ranged from 0.75-0.91, which is a comparable to those reported for rural agro-ecosystems. SQI values were higher on average at sites on soils with loam texture classes (0.86) compared to sites with sandy soils (0.81). Factor analysis indicated that several soil properties were important to explaining variability in UA sites included total C, CEC, extractable P, extractable Pb, bulk density, aggregate mean weight diameter and available water capacity.  Several sites contained high concentrations of total soil C, which averaged 56.9 g kg^-1 across all sites, likely due to repeated applications of compost. All observations indicate that UA is not constrained by soil properties at these sites and that management for UA can result in high quality soils.