ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Farm vehicles approaching weights of sauropods exceed safe mechanical limits for soil functioning.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Radial Water Loss Assay in Rice Roots Grown in Different Media.Bio-protocol · 2026Article
- Land degradation is associated with larger crop yield gaps across global croplands.Nature food · 2026Article
- Root structural remodeling under soil compaction for herbaceous plants.Plant diversity · 2026Article
- RootXplorer: A computer vision-based 3D phenotyping platform for high-throughput quantification and spatio-temporal analysis of root system penetrability.Plant phenomics (Washington, D.C.) · 2025Article
- The invisible subsoil compaction risk under no-till farming.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Integrating belowground recovery into tropical forest restoration design and monitoring.Bioscience · 2025Article
- Elimination of Intraspecific Competition Does Not Improve Maize Leaf Physiological and Biochemical Responses to Topsoil Degradation.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Development and In-Field Validation of an Autonomous Soil Mechanical Resistance Sensor.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Root Circumnutation Reduces Mechanical Resistance to Soil Penetration.Plant, cell & environment · 2025Article
- A unifying modelling of multiple land degradation pathways in Europe.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Dynamic imaging of force chains in 3D granular media.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Uncovering root compaction response mechanisms: new insights and opportunities.Journal of experimental botany · 2024Article
- Testing the niche reduction hypothesis for a fossorial rodent (Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mechanization has greatly contributed to the success of modern agriculture, with vastly expanded food production capabilities achieved by the higher capacity of farm machinery. However, the increase in capacity has been accompanied by higher vehicle weights that increase risks of subsoil compaction. We show here that while surface contact stresses remained nearly constant over the course of modern mechanization, subsoil stresses have propagated into deeper soil layers and now exceed safe mechanical limits for soil ecological functioning. We developed a global map for delineating subsoil compaction susceptibility based on estimates of mechanization level, mean tractor size, soil texture, and climatic conditions. The alarming trend of chronic subsoil compaction risk over 20% of arable land, with potential loss of productivity, calls for a more stringent design of farm machinery that considers intrinsic subsoil mechanical limits. As the total weight of modern harvesters is now approaching that of the largest animals that walked Earth, the sauropods, a paradox emerges of potential prehistoric subsoil compaction. We hypothesize that unconstrained roaming of sauropods would have had similar adverse effects on land productivity as modern farm vehicles, suggesting that ecological strategies for reducing subsoil compaction, including fixed foraging trails, must have guided these prehistoric giants.
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