Concepts

Soil Fertility

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Soil Fertility." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/soil-fertility.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Soil Fertility. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/soil-fertility

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-soil-fertility,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Soil Fertility},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/soil-fertility},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A soil's capacity to keep feeding crops: its stock of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and trace nutrients, its organic matter and the living community that cycles them, its structure and water-holding. Every fertility practice in this atlas, rotation, manure, compost, cover crops, synthetic fertilizer, is a way of paying back what harvests remove, and exhausted fertility is the quiet cause behind abandoned fields from Mesopotamia onward.

Facts

Origin Year

1840 1

Dated to Justus von Liebig's 1840 Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, which displaced the humus theory with the mineral theory of plant nutrition and founded the scientific study of soil fertility.

Cross-Tradition Connections