To meet the challenges of food insecurity, poverty and overall agricultural transformation, Ethiopia is implementing an agriculture-led economic strategy. However, numerous biotic and abiotic factors including unavailability of inputs, pests, poor soil fertility and other management aspects have been identified to limit the productivity of most cereal crops.
The author gives more emphasis to the acid soil infertility problem, which limits crop production in 30% highly weathered acidic soils of Ethiopia. The common natural and anthropogenic causes of soil acidification are the presence of acidic parent materials, removal of basic cations by crops and leaching, use of acid-forming fertilizers, carbonic acid production from microbial and plant respiration, acid rain, oxidation of sulfides and organic acids secreted by plant.
When soil becomes more acidic, particularly when the pH drops below 4.5, it becomes difficult to produce in most of the food crops. As soil pH declines, the supply of most plant nutrients decreases while aluminium (Al) and a few micronutrients become more soluble and toxic to plants. Thus, the low yield of crops grown on acidic soils is due to a combination of nutrient deficiencies, toxicity and low activities of beneficial microorganisms.
Since wheat is one of the major commodity crops of Ethiopia and its production is highly affected by acid soil infertility, the author was highly interested in assessing the impact of soil acidity on wheat crop yield. As such, based on the report from Tigray Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), the author decided to conduct the research in the highlands of Tsegede district, Tigray Region, northern Ethiopia.
Thereby, the research tries to find out and reveal the extent and severity of the soil acidity of the area, the degree of effectiveness of the liming materials, the residual and over-liming effects and the interaction effects of the liming materials with applied N, P and S fertilizers on soil microbes and wheat crop production. Finally, the author believes that these research findings could be disseminated to areas all over the world that suffer from soil acidity problems. This, in turn, could support to management of soil acidity impact and contribute its part in enhancing world wheat crop production trend.
