Optimum Soil Water, Nutrient and Oxygen Contents in Soil Water Retention Technology (SWRT) Improved Sustainable Agricultural Production on Highly Permeable Soils.

Plant water deficits prevent maximum crop production. Rising populations are projected to require 70% more food and 40% more water by 2050. Since the majority of highly productive soils are currently engaged with agriculture, innovative hydropedological approaches are needed to convert large tracts of less productive sandy soils into long-term sustainable agriculture. Current projections of localized droughts combined with reductions in stored surface water and receding groundwater levels demand newly engineered soil water storage technologies for improving water use efficiency. Six years of field studies have identified a new soil water retention technology (SWRT) designed to optimize soil water, soil nutrient and soil oxygen levels in plant root zones. New membrane approaches offer multiple soil methods for overcoming biophysical stresses currently limiting maximum genetic potentials of most crop cultivars. Engineered subsurface SWRT impermeable membranes are designed to intercept up to 90% of irrigation and rainfall and drain excess soil water within 10 hours following rare rainfall events. Recent modeling coupled with oxygen measurements of soil solutions have demonstrated no soil oxygen deficiencies. Final verification of well aerated root zones, confirmed by 16S RNA evaluations of soil microbial communities, demonstrated the expected separation in microbial communities with depth, but without alteration by membrane, irrigation rate or crop variety. Based on community differences between the SWRT and control samples, there is no indication of a shift to an anaerobic community. This report includes unprecedented improvements in vegetable and row crop production in sandy soils across multiple ecosystem regions. Therefore, we believe SWRT has the potential to alleviate plant drought and improve the resilience of cropping systems to climate change, enhancing food production in humid and arid regions globally.