Crop CultivationRestoring Soil FertilityRonan Crippa, Arianit Ramiqi, and Ekaterina Scholz

On a global scale wheat grows in the moderate climate zones and among the top wheat producing countries are the EU, China, India, Russia, and the US. If one takes a look at Switzerland it imports 200 times more wheat than it exports. The import is equally distributed between Switzerland’s neighbours Austria, Germany, and France as well as Canada and Russia.

Looking at the Canton of Zurich the Wehntal Valley is an area that is mostly dominated by crop production. Winter wheat and barley are the predominant crops cultivated in the valley. For this reason it becomes our area of research. When planning on which crop to cultivate on a certain field it is important to take the soil suitability into consideration which does not follow any parcelation structure. Every plant has different requirements to the soil and every soil can offer different nutrients to the plant.

To be able to leave the spiral of high input production microorganisms can be seen as the key element. They are able to store large amounts of nutrition as they need the same substances to grow. As soon as they die the nutrition becomes accessible to the plant. To increase their number it is important to supply them with organic carbon as well as nitrogen. The leftovers of those organisms are capable to enclose water in between the mineral material for storage keeping the soil from being washed out and making it more resilient to droughts.

Meliorations in Switzerland where long understood as all land improvement measures. In the 19th century property amalgamation was incorporated into the term. Nevertheless, until the Second World War meliorations were mostly used as a tool to safeguard settlements and improve cultivated land.During and after the Second World War property amalgamations became much more widely implemented and intensified. The goal was an increase in food production with the “Anbauschlacht” and a rational land use in regard to mechanisation. Since the 1970s and especially today the so-called general meliorations try to bring together the interests of agriculture, spatial planning, and especially nature and landscape conservation. The reason for this shift of emphasis was the effect of the large scale meliorations of the past.