Soil quality changes along an agroecological transition: Evidence from natural farming in Madhya Pradesh, India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The scale and intensity of current agricultural practices have negative impacts on soil quality. Shifting to agroecological and natural farming practices, which replace chemical inputs with biological inputs and processes, can reduce these impacts. Yet, transforming conventional farms into more sustainable farms requires an “agroecological transition”, with multiple pathways to replace pesticides and fertilizers. We measured multi-year soil indicators in a chronosequence of farms at various phases of transitioning to natural farming in central India: conventional, newly transitioned with no chemical pesticides, newly transitioned with no chemical pesticides and fertilizers, fully established with no chemical pesticides and fully established with no chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Over two years, we measured soil carbon (C) pools (total C and active C), nitrogen content, enzyme activity, bulk density, and microbial communities. Our results show that fully established natural farms exhibit improved soil quality indicators year over year. We observed higher soil C pools even after the initial steps toward natural farming, for instance, recently transitioned farms averaged 2.9 % soil C and 789.48 mg kg −1 active C, compared to 1.1 % and 437.56 mg kg −1 in conventional farms, indicating their sensitivity to changes in management practices early in an agroecological transition. Soil microbial composition also significantly differed across the transition phases, indicating strong management effects on soil functioning. Understanding soil quality along various management pathways is essential to provide actionable soil quality assessments, as well as to provide important indicators to motivate even the most risk-averse farmers to undertake agroecological transitions. • In natural farming systems, bio-inputs improve soil health indicators. • Enhanced soil quality is observed even in early phases of natural farming transition. • Soil microbial communities significantly shift with reduced chemical inputs. • Carbon-based indicators are most sensitive to agroecological transition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".