HISTORY AND PRACTICAL ASPECTS OF ACID SOILS LIMING IN RUSSIA
Years of experience and practice of agriculture have shown continuous acidification and depletion of calcium and magnesium agricultural land, with the result that every year our country gets about 20 million tons in terms of grain. The efficiency of mineral fertilizers is sharply reduced, the ecological situation of the environment is deteriorating, the quality of agricultural products is falling. The article reveals the historical stages of liming, new approaches to this technique associated with the use of raw dolomite flour. It is shown that along with natural lime materials, it is important to use lime containing industrial waste as an important and fairly cheap source of chemical meliorants. Many of them, having a high activity of interaction with the soil, significantly exceed natural carbonates, and the impurities of trace elements contained in them often have a positive effect on the growth and development of cultivated crops. However, most of them may contain a variety of heavy metals and other toxic elements that are hazardous to the ecological status of soils and adjacent environments, and should therefore be subject to comprehensive environmental assessment and regulation based on monitoring results. Much attention is paid to the creation of software and hardware systems for the differentiated application of lime meliorants and mineral fertilizers with the help of modern machines.