Healthy Soils for Productivity and Sustainable Development in Agriculture

Abstract A healthy soil is considered a dynamic living system that is capable of providing multiple benefits to ecosystems such as sustaining plant and animal production and health, enhancing or maintaining water and air quality, controlling nutrient availability, accumulating soil carbon, supporting biodiversity, and reducing erosion. Soil health is the foundation of crop health and productivity, as well as sustainable agriculture. The knowledge of soil health connects agricultural legislation, stakeholder needs, and maintainable produce management. Today, the goals of sustainable agriculture not only focus on crop production based on nutrient management, but also overall health of humans and maintaining or enhancing environmental aspects, including climate change. However, soil health assessments are largely influenced by fertility status, despite a shift toward acknowledging the important role of a diverse soil microbiome, water and air quality, and climate change mitigation due to limited understanding of the ecological and biological processes and lack of effective techniques to measure. This review focused on soil functions and their benefits to the ecosystem by describing various indicators as a representation of physical, chemical, and biological properties. The concept of soil health and its applications in farming systems were presented using results and illustrations from various typical farm management systems. The connection between healthy soils, soil productivity, and sustainable soil management strategies provides evidence on the importance of a holistic approach for managing healthy soils through quantification of soil health indicators. In general, evaluating and monitoring soil health periodically is necessary to assess the productivity of agricultural land and to create new generations of soil health assessments that will offer better future opportunities for growers, scientists, and other stakeholders to precisely achieve the sustainable development goals.