On the issue of involving abandoned agricultural land in crop rotation

¹ All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Soybean, Blagoveshchensk, Russia
² Far Eastern State Agrarian University, 86, Politeknicheskaya Str., Blagoveschensk, Russia

^* Corresponding author: agrofak06@mail.ru

Abstract

In the nineties of the last century due to the known economic stress experienced in this time in Russia there were more than fifty million hectors of arable lands withdrawn from the Russian agricultural turnover. There are more than one million hectors of such arable deserted lands in the Amur Region of the Russian Federation (The Far Eastern part of Russia). These arable lands have turned into deteriorating lands in abeyance being colonized by weeds and periodically attacked by fires. As a result of this, these promising agricultural lands, being used for the food supply and forage resources production, have lost their primary purpose of use. It has become a serious national economic problem. Nowadays there is a gradual inclusion of such arable lands into soya and wheat production. The conduction of agrochemical and geo-botanical research needed for suitability evaluation of such arable lands for soya and wheat species cultivation is to a certain degree very expensive and time-consuming procedure. Our research work suggests implementing resources-evaluating method which implies one-time route study in the period of mass flowering of plants and identifying the plants of the arable lands that have resource value. If the number of these plants exceeds eighty percent in relation to the whole species composition, then such arable lands are considered to be suitable for crop rotation. If this ratio is less than sixty percent, then it is necessary to take extra measures in order to reduce the number of weeds and woody plants on such arable lands.