Comprehensive Assessment of Agricultural Land by the Example of the Southern Urals

Comprehensive assessment of agricultural land is aimed at determining agroecological and economic conditions controlling the direction and efficiency of land use. The assessment is performed in a hierarchy: natural and agricultural zone, province, group, and type of land. The assessment procedure is illustrated by the examples of Orenburg oblast, Southern Urals. This territory is located in the forest-steppe, steppe, and dry-steppe zones represented by various provinces. In each province, agroecological groups of automorphic (plakor), semi-hydromorphic, erosion-prone, solonetzic, lithogenic, and floodplain lands have been identified, for which landscape-adaptive farming systems have been developed. Different agricultural technologies are related to the different types of land separated within the groups. The productivity of the main types of land and the economic efficiency of their use at three levels of agricultural intensification are estimated on the basis of data obtained from long-term field experiments and agroclimatic models. On the basis of the proposed methodology of land assessment, the problem of optimizing agricultural nature management is considered.