Importance of Organic Carbon in Soil- Dr P. C. Patel, Dr Vikram Parmar and Dr Kailas Malode

Soil organic carbon is an essential component of soil health, fertility, and ecosystem services, including food production. Soils with high carbon content are likely to be more productive and better able to filter and purify water. Soil organic carbon is an important indicator of soil quality and helps to regulate nutrient supply, microbial activity, and soil moisture content. If organic carbon is low in soil then that soil is poor in fertility and it has low availability of most plant nutrients. The food of microorganisms is an organic matter so poor soil has a lower population of micro-organisms resulting in less availability of plant nutrients either natively or applied through manures or chemical fertilizers. The organic matter can be improved in soil by adding green manure, sowing legumes or plus crops, adding manures and chemical fertilizers. India is located in a tropical climate so the decomposition rate is faster moreover farmers do intensive farming so there is more uptake of organic carbon from soil as compared to monocropping. Organic farming, natural farming, and regenerative agriculture have been recently given more weight as our Indian soil has low organic carbon. The human population of India is the highest in the world and to supply food to them there is an urgent need to increase crop productivity it is only possible to make the soil more productive through the above-mentioned farming systems. We have observed that although we are increasing crop productivity through conventional farming now soil becomes less productive in the absence of microbes in soil as they are killed due to excessive chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides.