SOIL SAMPLING AT THE EXPERIMENTAL FIELD OF THE ECOTWINS PROJECT
09.09.2024
Harvesting crops in the field does not mean the end of work on the experiment. One of the main tasks of the HORIZON EUROPE, ECOTWINS project "Research Capacity Building and Upskilling and Upgrading the Research Team in NUBiP (Ukraine) on Agroecological Intensification for Crop Production " is to conduct field tests of the combined effect of the introduction of biostimulants and compatible crops on the productivity of agro-ecosystems and their ecological sustainability. Soil fertility indicators are an important indicator of ecosystem stability.
After harvesting the crops, the project participants, consisting of professor Dmytro Litvinov, associate professors Volodymyr Kozak, Olena Litvinova, and Olena Pikovska, and graduate student Lyudmila Gordienko under the guidance of the project coordinator, professor Oksana Tonkha, took soil samples for analysis according to the experiment options.
One of the indicators of soil health is its structure. After all, the optimal conditions of physical, water, air, thermal and nutritional regimes of the soil are created precisely in the structural soil. We selected soil samples to determine the content of structural aggregates and their water resistance, which will be analyzed in detail in the laboratory by the method of dry and wet sieving. However, it is worth noting that the positive influence of compatible three-component crops on the structural condition of the typical chernozem is noticeable already during the selection of samples: the agronomically valuable aggregates of granular structure prevailed in the composition. We made similar conclusions based on the density of the soil composition. It is also planned to compare the effect of various drugs on the physical properties of typical chernozem. In the selected samples, in addition to the physical ones, indicators of the physico-chemical and agrochemical properties of the soil will be determined.