The Available‐water Capacity of a Sandy Loam Soil

Summary The effects of annual application of farmyard manure and of different cultivation treatments for a 6‐year period on the available‐water capacity of a sandy loam soil have been measured. It has been shown that the farmyard manure applications have led to a significant increase in the available‐water capacity of the soil. The cultivation treatments influenced the available‐water capacity to a lesser extent. It is suggested that the reason why many previous workers have failed to detect an increase in available‐water capacity in comparable experiments is that they did not use sufficiently accurate methods for the determination of field capacity and the permanent wilting percentage, i.e. the upper and lower limits of the available water in the soil.