Sustainable Soil Fertility Management in the Tropics

Sustainable soil fertility management is a peasant approach that combines the potentials of soybean as sources of both food and fertilizer for the well being of the farmer and the soil in an environmental-friendly organic farming system. Due to misplaced policy issues on rural development to halt the mass exodus of able-bodied youths to developed cities, the labour force in the farming industry has been on steady decrease leaving the aged persons in the business of producing food for the teeming population. This book provides the way out of the tedium and time lag inherent in agroforestry and Shifting cultivation practices which are both ecologically and biologically sound and stable by utilizing the short duration, fertilizer replacement value and nutritional importance of soybean which compensates their labour adequately. The farmer gains more than ever before from his labour input in terms of food and fertilizer and the yield of his crop is not reduced though he engages his plot on continuous cultivation as exemplified by using maize as the test crop. This approach is considered a desideratum in sustainable soil fertility managements in the tropics to arrest yield decline.