This blog was written by Ángel Héctor Hernández Romero
Facultad de Ingeniería en Sistemas de Producción Agropecuaria
Universidad Veracruzana (Agricultural Production Systems Engineering
while attending a workshop with farmers in a little indigenous village in Los Tuxtlas Natural Reserve with some colleagues and students from the State University of Veracruz (Southern Mexico
A farmer pointed out that the stones on his land seemed to be growing
I applied my liquid (what local farmers call herbicides)
I harvested my corn; I have done this for five years
and the only thing that has grown are the stones
We immediately noticed that the stones were bigger than they were some years before
What was actually happening was the loss of soil by water erosion (Fig 1)
Soil erosion is one of the most serious problems in the region
The main land uses are coffee and maize croplands and grasslands under conventional management practices that promote soil degradation
Soil losses are measured through direct methods
and estimated with models such as the Universal Soil Loss Equation
As a result of the conditions described above
an average of 200 tons of soil are lost per hectare and year
and crop productivity is dwindling in a region where people live in remote and marginalized villages
and some other signs in the landscape emerge from the surface showing the suffered soil erosion; a quantification of the soil lost can be done using the stone height (Fig 3)
disappeared wetlands tell us where eroded sediment has been deposited; detached soil reaches the bottom of water bodies
This is the language we have to translate in order to understand what is happening and what action researchers
students and farmers must take to safeguard our soils
We can protect our soils through better practices such as crop and grazing rotation
terraces and other methods that would give us more efficient and sustainable systems
The views expressed here belong to the speaker and do not necessarily represent FAO’s views
International Year of Soils 2015 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 00153, Rome Italy[email protected]