Sustainability: A view from the wind-eroded field

This article explores the assessment of sustainability in fields subject to wind erosion. In the first part simple sustainability audits are examined as of soil depth and nutrients. Direct measurement of these characteristics has many problems largely because of huge variability in space and time at all scales. Modelling still has its problems but it may be possible to overcome many of them soon. It is true that wind erosion preferentially removes soil nutrients but there are imponderables even here. The nutrient balance in many of these soils includes considerable input from dust. In West Africa it has been shown that the amounts of calcium and potassium that are added in dust are sufficient to fertilize dispersed crops. In mildly acidic sandy soils such as those found on the widespread palaeoaeolian deposits much of the phosphorus is fixed and unavailable to plants by the time it is removed by wind erosion so that erosion has no added downside. Most of the nutrients carried by dust have been shown to travel close to the ground (even when they are attached to dust-sized particles) and so are trapped in nearby fallow strips and are thus not lost to the farming system. Second the sustainability of a whole semi-arid farming system is explored. Wind erosion in semi-arid areas (like China the Sahel and Northwestern Europe) generally takes place on aeolian deposits of the recent geological past. Most of these soils are deep enough to withstand centuries of wind erosion before they are totally lost to production and some of these soils have greater fertility at greater depth (so that wind erosion may even improve the soil). Finally some remarks are made about environmental change in relation to sustainability.