Agricultural Physics

Agricultural Physics deals with the application of physical principles and processes in agriculture. It deals with the aspects of soil, water and environment, three natural resources and key factors in crop production. Soil physics is the study of soil physical properties and processes. It is applied to management and prediction under natural and managed ecosystems. Soil physics deals with the dynamics of physical soil components and their phases as solids, liquids, and gases. It draws on the principles of physics, physical chemistry, engineering, and meteorology. It is especially important in this day and age because most farmers require an understanding of agro-ecosystems. Soil physics applies these principles to address practical problems of agriculture, ecology, and engineering. The importance to preserve soil and water have is increasingly recognized. Agricultural practices and ecological trends both affect and are affected by soil physical properties. The more frequency of natural disasters, as landslides and thunderstorms addresses the importance to integrate soil characteristics in predictive models. Soil physics research has grown considerably specially in the use of innovative sensors, soil databases, and modeling techniques have been introduced into soil water relationship and environmental monitoring. The resistances to liquid water transport in the soil and plant were determined directly and simultaneously from measurements of soil, root, and leaf water potentials and the flux of water through the soil-plant system to the sites of evaporation in the leaf. As soil water was depleted, water flow through the soil and plant decreased to one-tenth the maximum rate, but both the soil resistance and plant resistance increased. The book includes procedures for using soil physics in agriculture and estimating soil physical properties from more readily available data and shows how soil physical data can be integrated into land planning and management decisions.

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