Book Review 25
Review
Title: Soil Water and Agronomic Productivity (Advances in Soil Science series)
Author(s): CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group
Editor(s): Rattan Lal and B.A. Stewart
Publisher:
ISBN 13: 9781439850794
Published: 2012
Pages: 578
Cost: $69.95
Rating (1-5): 3
Submitted By: Chatterjee, Amitava
Date posted: August 05, 2013
A Complete Evaluation of Sustainable Water Use
Soil water conservation and maximizing its use efficiency are critical for sustainable agronomic crop productivity. Dr. Lal is distinguished university professor of soil physics and the director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at The Ohio State University, and authored and coauthored about 1500 papers and wrote 15 books and edited or coedited 48 books. Dr. Stewart is distinguished professor of soil science at the West Texas A&M University, Canyon, Texas and director of the US Department of Agriculture Conservation and production laboratory at Bushland, Texas. ‘Soil Water and Agronomic Productivity’ in Advances in Soil Science series edited by Drs. Lal and Stewart, addressed the quantification of the global water resources, potential management strategies to increase water use efficiency, and economic issues under twenty-one chapters, broadly grouped into (i) water and agronomic productivity, (ii) water resources and agriculture, (iii) irrigation and soil water management, (iv) agronomic management of soil and crop, (v) policy and economics, (vi) tools of watershed management, and (vii) research and development priorities. Editors made significant effort in gathering expertise around the world to talk about regional water issues, promising management plan and predictive modeling. These papers will definitely wide open our view in managing water resource and showed us how imperative it is to include water as driving factor in designing crop and soil management program. On opening chapter, Rai and Singh presented distributions of water balance and how climate change and global warming influence water resource. Dr. Lal accounted different aspects of water use in agronomic production in the following chapter, ‘Soil water and agronomic production’. Under section two (Water resources and agriculture), I found chapter 4: Desired future conditions for groundwater availability in the High Plains Aquifer system’ by Sheng et al., informative and interesting. Another noteworthy chapter, Sustainable soil water management systems (chapter 10) by Besch et al. explained interactive effects of different crop production factors like, soil processes, tillage, residue, irrigation management on soil water dynamics. Soil management practices like row and spacing and mulch or residue additions alter the soil water balance, were presented in chapter 14: Manipulating crop geometric to increase yield in dryland areas by Stewart and Lal; and chapter 15: Mulch tillage for conserving soil water. Agronomic researchers will find this book useful reference and I think inclusion of some chapters mentioned above in graduate level course will definitely benefit students in developing a broad overview of soil water resource use from regional to global scale. I suggest editors to include following more current research questions in future edition of this book (i) use of water in biofuel crop production and consequences of feedstock production on soil water conservation, (ii) interaction between nutrient and water use efficiency, (iii) concept of water footprint calculation, and (iv) application of GIS and remote sensing in understanding soil water dynamics etc.