Sustainable Agriculture: Soil Health and Waste Management

Dear Colleagues,

Awareness of the fact that healthy soils are central to achieving the sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly is growing. Soils, as the thinnest life supporting system, not only sustain our food systems but filter and regulate the flow of freshwater, store vast quantities of carbon and support whole so far unknown ecosystems where micro- and macro-organisms are able to maintain the homeostasis of life.

The widely accepted definition of soil sustainability was given by Abbott and Murphy, who defined soil sustainability based on the Brundtland idea as “soil management that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs from that soil”.

It has to be mentioned that in the world’s scale, soils are increasingly under anthropogenic pressure driven by climate change, population growth and poor land management. In the light of the global economy producing large amounts of wastes, there is an obvious necessity of finding an environmentally and economically sound methods of utilization these wastes as soil amendments.

The most important approach seems to be recycling the large amounts of organic wastes produced by agriculture, forestry, urban and industrial activities as soil organic amendments. This is the most popular and efficient option for avoiding their dispersion into the environment and restoring, maintaining or even improving the content of the most valuable fraction of soils, i.e., its soil organic matter.

The wide introduction of the concept of waste upgrading may contribute to application of value-added materials such as biochar and activated carbon, as well as compost generated form municipal and agricultural wastes, which are produced using the thermo-chemical conversion of organic waste. Their use has gained an emerging interest because of their low cost and unique physico-chemical properties. The anaerobic digestion of some organic wastes (slurry of different origins, manures, by-products of food industry, including spoil food, etc.) is a technology which has been successfully implemented in many regions of the world as a method of generating renewable energy. However, its by-product, i.e., digestate, is generated in huge quantities, and although its application to soil is a prevailing option of managing it, the effects of digestate application in a long-term perspective have yet to be studied. Organic-waste-derived materials seem to have multifunctional abilities in the environment for capturing greenhouse gases and the remediation of contaminated soil.

So, the intention of this Special Issue is to present a wide scope of studies focused on the above-mentioned aspects of soil sustainability. Reviews as well as reports are welcome. We would like to ensure potential authors that manuscripts will be peer-reviewed, and efforts will be given to ensure a quick publishing time.

Dr. Andrzej Klasa
Guest Editor

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