The Stony Soils Reclamation Systems in Agricultural Lands: A Review

Abstract

The agricultural soil is a highly variable and complex active medium for the plant’s life. Due to prolonged formation processes, it must be considered as a non-renewable resource, easily subject to many degradative processes, in most cases due to human activities. These activities lead to the definition of “anthropic” soils, often labelled also as “disturbed”, “manipulated”, “artificial”, or “deviations” of the natural soil continuum. In the agronomic sense, however, when these deviations result from the optimization of structural characteristics of fine earth fractions, they may represent the main quality parameters of soil in terms of physical, chemical, and biological fertility. Nevertheless, over the fine earth fractions, many agricultural soils have a variable percentage of varying coarse fractions in their arable layer, interfering with cultivation needs, damaging the machinery, and requiring extra energy and time for soil tillage. They may even make the use of machinery impracticable. When these conditions occur, it becomes necessary to proceed with soil destoning to recover arable land and optimize the cultural management according to modern farming techniques and machines for soil cultivation. The research aimed at evaluating the different possibilities of reclamation of stony soils and the machines that can be used in different environmental conditions, according to the various cultivation needs, and for the recovery and optimization of the non-renewable resource “soil”. This review briefly summarizes the soil destoning techniques currently available for agricultural lands: 1) the collection and removal of stones from the field; 2) the on-site stones crushing; 3) the stone burial.