Towards transdisciplinary understanding of inherited soil surveys: an exploratory case study in Zambia.

可持续农业必须保护土壤，使其能够长期用于农业。社区调整其耕作方式以应对环境、经济和社会挑战。这一适应过程可以得到研究的支持，但前提是我们了解土壤，了解土壤的性质、潜力和局限性在空间上的变化，以及社区过去如何适应其耕作方式。传统上，土壤调查是一种获取土壤变化及其应用知识的方法。目前，可持续农业的发展在许多国家，特别是在全球南方国家是一个挑战，尤其是因为气候变化。解决这些问题需要不同专家之间的合作。一个技术解决方案是否会成功，至少在一定程度上取决于社会因素。一项创新是否与社区的实践、价值观和传统相容？它是否会影响农业劳动在不同时期、不同社会群体、成人和儿童之间以及性别之间的分工？对农业系统的研究还表明，这些系统很少是固定的，而是随着时间的推移而发生变化，以响应不同的社会和环境因素。这表明，在为当代粮食安全问题制定强有力、公平和有效的解决方案时，从历史角度看待可持续农业可能与从自然科学和社会科学角度看待可持续农业同样重要。我们认为，从殖民时代（20世纪30年代在撒哈拉以南非洲南部，SSA）到20世纪末，对土壤调查过程和结果的合作研究将为自然科学家、社会科学家和历史学家提供一个理解可持续农业的综合方法的背景。它还将解决一个非常紧迫的实际问题。这一问题是关于大部分SSA地区土壤及其空间变化的信息缺乏。收集土壤数据的成本很高，而且很少有人有这方面的专业知识。然而，过去在非洲进行的土壤调查很少被用来解决当代的问题。我们认为，这些来源提供了一个独特的窗口，以了解过去关于土壤的决定和假设，其影响今天仍然可以感受到。在这些土壤调查中，嵌入了一套丰富的观察和解释，以及硬数据（土壤分析）和地图。然而，旧的调查不能像新的一样重新使用。首先，确定分析是否仍然可靠是技术上的挑战。此外，这项调查是在特定的历史背景下进行的，目的是解决特定的问题。农业是由具有特定结构和权力关系的社区完成的，一些观点将比其他观点更能影响测量员。简而言之，土壤科学家、历史学家和社会科学家在评估一项继承的调查并确定其可能的优点和缺点的过程中都发挥着关键作用，当它被用来支持有关农业和土地的当代决策时。通过拟议的跨学科英国-赞比亚伙伴关系，我们将严格审查从殖民时期到现在在赞比亚创建的一些继承土壤调查，为其评估制定理论框架。我们的目的是展示如何从历史、社会科学和土壤科学的角度进行三角测量，从而对这些调查进行共同评估。此外，这一评价可以应用于该地区目前与土壤质量有关的紧迫问题。为此，我们将与政策制定者、农业顾问、非政府组织和农民团体合作，规划进一步资助的工作，以便在赞比亚和其他地方（南撒哈拉及其他地区）继承土壤调查，可以最好地用于发展可持续农业，作为未来粮食安全的基础。

Sustainable agriculture must preserve the soil so that it can be used agriculturally in the long term. Communities adapt their farming practices to face environmental, economic and social challenges. This process of adaptation can be supported by research, but only if we understand the soil, how its properties, potential and limitations vary in space and how communities have adapted their farming practices in the past. Soil survey has conventionally been a way to generate knowledge about the variation of the soil and how it is used. At present the development of sustainable agriculture is a challenge in many countries, particularly in the global south, not least because of climate change. Tackling these problems requires collaboration between different specialists. Whether a technical solution will succeed will always depend, at least in part, on social factors. Is an innovation compatible with practices, values and traditions of a community? Does it affect how agricultural labour is divided over time, between social groups, between adults and children and between genders? Studies of farming systems also show that these have rarely been fixed, but have changed over time, in response to different social and environmental factors. This suggests that a historical perspective on sustainable agriculture could be just as important as the perspective of the natural and social sciences in developing robust, equitable and effective solutions to contemporary problems in food security. We contend that collaborative study of the processes and products of soil survey from the colonial era (1930s in southern Sub-Saharan Africa, SSA) until the late 20th century, would provide a context in which natural scientists, social scientists and historians could develop an integrated approach to understanding sustainable agriculture. It would also address a very pressing practical problem.This problem is the scarcity of information on the soil and its variation in space over most of SSA. Collecting soil data is costly, and few people have the expertise to do it. Yet, the soil surveys produced in Africa in the past, have rarely been mobilised to address contemporary problems. We contend that these sources provide a unique window into past decisions and assumptions about the soil, whose effects are still felt today. In these soil surveys are embedded a rich set of observations and interpretations, along with hard data (soil analyses) and maps. However, old surveys cannot just be dusted off and used as if new. First, there is the technical challenge of determining whether the analyses are still reliable. Furthermore, the survey was commissioned in a particular historical context to address particular problems. Farming was done by communities with particular structures and power relations, and some perspectives will have influenced surveyors more than others. In short, the soil scientist, historian and social scientist all have a critical role in the process of appraising an inherited survey and identifying its possible strengths and weakness when used to support contemporary decisions about farming and the land. Through the proposed cross disciplinary UK-Zambia partnership, we will critically interrogate a number of inherited soil surveys created in Zambia, from the colonial period to the present, developing a theoretical framework for their appraisal. Our intention throughout is to show how triangulating perspectives from the history, social science and soil science can develop a shared evaluation of these surveys. An evaluation, furthermore, that can be applied to pressing current problems relating to soil quality in the region. To this end, we will engage with policy makers, agricultural advisors, NGOs and farmer groups to plan further funded work so that inherited soil surveys in Zambia, and elsewhere (SSA and beyond), can best be used to develop sustainable agriculture as a basis for food security into the future.