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Assessing and managing soil quality for urban agriculture

Beniston, Joshua W.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1385415662

Abstract Details

2013, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Environment and Natural Resources.
The formerly industrial cities of the North Central region have become a rapidly expanding frontier for urban agriculture (UA) in the US. As populations in these cities have declined, a legacy of vacant land and properties has been left behind. UA has emerged as an important means of utilizing vacant land and is capable of producing numerous societal benefits. Urban soils, however, are highly variable and subject to high levels of degradation. An understanding of local soil properties is a basic starting point for sustainable agriculture, yet very little information exists about the characteristics of urban soils or options for their management. Through this dissertation project I have worked to address this unique knowledge gap by generating important background data and management recommendations for urban soils. The first chapter of this dissertation synthesizes available information on topics that are key to this project, including: the extant of vacant land and UA in the region around Ohio, management of UA systems, soil quality (SQ) assessment and soil properties and ecology in urban areas. The second chapter presents an experiment that evaluated soil properties in an urban soil following the demolition of vacant houses, as well as the ability of amendments produced from organic waste materials to improve SQ and support vegetable crop production under these conditions. The experimental site was located in a series of adjacent vacant urban lots in Youngstown OH and utilized a split-plot design to test differences in soil properties and crop growth. Main plots tested the effect of organic matter treatments while the split plots evaluated raised bed cultivation. The experiment was conducted during the 2011 and 2012 growing seasons and soil physical, chemical and biological properties were measured at the initiation and conclusion of the experiment. A SQ index was developed using multivariate analyses and scoring functions from the Soil Management Assessment Framework (SMAF). Significant soil compaction was observed at the site following demolition activities. Amendments resulted in significant improvement to a number of soil physical, chemical and biological properties. SQ index values ranged rom 0.60 in control plots to 0.85 in compost+biochar. All observations suggest that amendments produced from urban green wastes can improve SQ for UA. The third chapter comprises a field study of SQ at nine urban market gardens in the cities of Cleveland and Youngstown, OH. Soil samples were collected from these sites where producers are growing vegetables for market on urban soils. SQI values for the urban market garden sites ranged from 0.75-0.91, which is a comparable to those reported for rural agro-ecosystems. All observations in this study indicate that UA is not constrained by soil properties at these sites and that management for UA can result in high quality soils. The fourth chapter contains a synthesis of observations on the potential of UA to address food security in American cities, soil conditions in vacant urban lots, recommended management practices and researchable priorities for the topic of UA.
Rattan Lal , PhD (Advisor)
Nicholas Basta, PhD (Committee Member)
Kristin Mercer, PhD (Committee Member)
Martin Shipitalo, PhD (Committee Member)
268 p.
Agriculture; Agronomy; Biogeochemistry; Ecology; Soil Sciences
soil science; soil quality; urban agriculture; shrinking cities; Youngstown, OH; Cleveland, OH; soil management assessment framework; factor analysis, soil carbon; compost

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Citations

  • Beniston, J. W. (2013). Assessing and managing soil quality for urban agriculture [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1385415662

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Beniston, Joshua. Assessing and managing soil quality for urban agriculture. 2013. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1385415662.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Beniston, Joshua. "Assessing and managing soil quality for urban agriculture." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1385415662

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1385415662
3,756
© 2013, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Assessing and managing soil quality for urban agriculture by Joshua W. Beniston is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.