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Soil has a volume: Volumetric versus gravimetric expression of soil nutrient contents in understanding soil-plant interrelationships

Soil is a three-dimensional natural growth medium supporting plants, with variable proportions of solid, liquid, and gaseous phases. The inorganic solid phase consists of fine earth (< 2 mm), coarse fragments (> 2 mm), and even larger fractions. The higher surface area of fine earth, consisting of clay, silt, and sand influences soil fertility, and the increased content of fine earth makes the soil more fertile. However, depending on the conditions of soil development, part of the soil volume is occupied by gravel, a non-soil material (Rao and Jessy, 2007). Gravel is the term used to denote soil particles of size ranging from 2 to 75 mm along the greatest diameter (Brady, 2000). Gravel dilutes soil volume and depending on the conditions of soil development, gravel content varies causing variation in the exploitable soil volume (Rao and Vijayakumar, 2011). It may be noted that the proportions of fine earth and coarse fragments are inversely related and the quantity of available nutrients decreases with an increase in coarse fragments content as only fine earth contributes to nutrient availability (Brady and Weil, 2007). Hence it is required to consider the agronomic impact of coarse fragments and the importance of change in expression of soil nutrients to refine data collection and analysis as well. Soil fertility assessment is necessary for soil health management and the method of analysis matters in the assessment. Usually, a soil sample is initially processed, passed through a 2 mm sieve and the fine earth is analyzed for nutrient elements while coarse fragments are ignored infertility assessment thus the real situation of availability is not revealed. Consider two jars of similar volume, one filled with fine earth while the other one filled with 50% each of fine earth and gravel. Chemical analysis indicates the same quantity of an element, for exam-