ИСТИНА

The introduction of precision farming systems in practice requires detailed information in the field scale. Spatial heterogeneity of soil and agrochemical parameters should be documented and related to the yield. The considered problem requires scientific and methodological justification taking into account local conditions of farming: soil, environment, crop rotation, processing technology. Another challenge is identification of degraded soils and land, i.e., separating anthropogenic soil degradation from natural variation of soil properties in space. One of the hypotheses of this study was that in the natural environment everything is distributed unevenly; any soil property has a variation within one soil contour in agricultural systems, so it is incorrect to consider soil degradation or improving, comparing the average values. As a result, soil organic matter stocks on the investigated field showed the improving dynamics. On the field within the contour of Kastanozems, located in the Northern part of the Stavropol territory, there is uncertainty in determining the quality of land due to the natural variation of soil properties in space: the amount of the damage comparing the average value with the natural soil value, more than 3 times higher in absolute value than the amount of the damage comparing the interpolated data by kriging with the natural soil values. In the transition from an intensive to landscape-adaptive approach to agriculture, it is necessary to take into account the models of fertility of agroecosystems – to assess fertility it should be taking into account the spatial heterogeneity of soil properties. The study was performed with a financial support of the project No. 2018-14-588-0004-014 of the Federal Target Program «Research and development on priority directions of development of the scientific and technological complex of Russia for 2014 - 2020» and subsidy of the Government of Russian Federation to the Eurasian Center for Food Security (directive No. 24448-r).