ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses inherent fertility in relation to ecologically suited crops or varieties, based on the experimental farm, plot, rather than on peasant farmers' fields, and in any case not sufficiently numerous or evenly spaced to allow of mapping on the sub-continental. It focuses on soil profiles and fertility, erosion and conservation. Biotic factors over the centuries are regarded as more important than climate and soil in producing and maintaining the forests, degraded from the tropical dry deciduous type, itself largely biotic. Alluvium was distinguished according to the main rivers depositing it, along with coastal alluvium, while there was a useful recognition of calcareous soils, soils including a concretionary layer a few inches deep and saline soils. Soils geography of a large region such as the Indian subcontinent, it is wholly proper to consider first and even mainly the broad pattern of soil orders and sub-orders largely related by pedologists to macro-regional and regional complexes of climate and vegetation.
