Agrochemistry of the Soils of the USSR—Far West and Volga Regions

These two volumes are part of a continuing series of books which describe the kinds of soils, their chemical and physical properties and their respons e to fertilizers in agricultural regions of the USSR. The general format is to cover soils of areas somewhat smaller than states in the USA in individual chapters . Since these areas are adjacent to each other, much of the work is repetitive. The names used to classify soils in the Soviet Union wil l be familiar to most reader s who antedat e 7th Approximation soils literature. However, the subclassificatio n of Podsols, Chernozems, Gray-Wooded Soils, Meadow-Bog Soils, Chestnut Soils and the Solonet z Soils is so bewildering that one is almost tempted to appreciat e the new American classification scheme. These subclassification s are not well-defined and not always well-described. There are a lot of basi c soil analyses on hundreds of soils, many of which are useful to compar e with soils data from other parts of the world. However, one consistent fault of the soil analyses is the lack of definition of methods used to determine some of the soil properties. Since the individual chapter s have different authors, one would have expected that somewher e there would have been an accidental slip which revealed the methods. I found none. As examples , here are some of the measurement s reported with no means of identifying what they mean: Hydrolytic acidity, mobile aluminum, and phosphat e groups I, II, and III . Soil maps of the areas involved are entirely missing in the volume on the Far East and of very poor quality in the volume on the Volga region. There is great unevennes s in the area descriptions from chapter to chapter . Some chapter s give a pretty comprehensiv e review of climatic and soil parent material characteristics , whereas other chapter s do not mention these. Most of the space in both volumes is taken up by reviews of field experiment s carried out over the past 40 years at experi ment stations and collective farms. These experiment s are entirely reminiscent of experiment s that were carried out during the early part of this century at experiment stations throughout the USA. In the podzolic soils of the Far East USSR, respons e to phosphorus often was the major resul t found, indicating that the soils are very low in phosphorus and suggesting that agriculture there has a long way to go to reach high productivity. In general , the volumes read like combinations of county soil survey reports and yellowed experiment station bulletins. The value of the publications lies mostly in the soil descriptions and basi c chemical and physical data for fairly large areas of Russia. I gain the distinct impression that the authors are overwhelmed with data which they do not know how to interpret , whereas we Americans tend to be oversupplied with explanations which are unsupporte d by data. I believe that, becaus e of the data, the volumes have value to those in soil genesi s and classification, soil fertility, and geography . The most disappointing aspect s are the maps and the climatic and geological descriptions.—GRANT W. THOMAS, Department of Agronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky.