The influence of resource-saving agricultural technologies on soil quality and financial performance of farms

Climate change, intensive land use, anthropogenic pressure, and pollution all directly affect soil health and quality. This leads to a decrease in agricultural land productivity and profitability of production, threatening food security and reducing ecosystem services. Traditional farming methods have a negative impact on soil health, while sustainable agricultural technologies can reduce or avoid this impact. However, effective soil management requires farmers to make informed decisions about the feasibility and effectiveness of sustainable agricultural technologies at the local level. Monitoring the effectiveness of technology involves the use of “sensitive” criteria for determining soil quality and available analytical methods to establish their links with the financial results of the agricultural production unit. This approach can be the basis for determining the effectiveness of financial incentives in the implementation of resource-saving technologies. Microbiological indicators became one of the markers of soil quality. By establishing correlation dependencies and linear regression, it was determined that agricultural technologies can have a significant influence on soil quality, which was confirmed by the shift in the impact of some microbiological indicators on profits of the production unit under resource-saving agricultural technologies and on costs under conventional plowing. At the same time, all technologies showed a high level of correlation between microbiological indicators and crop yields. Therefore, effective soil fertility management through the use of sustainable agricultural technologies can improve soil quality and health to such an extent that it increases its fertility potential and provides additional income at lower production costs.