booklet aceh barat.pdf - Balai Penelitian Tanah

I. INTRODUCTION
In the traditional agricultural systems farmers experiment on the suitable
crops and decide at the later stage of plant growth, whether they would keep the
plant or replace with others that are expected to be more suitable and more
profitable. Experts in land evaluation, based on years of studies correlate plant
growth with climatic factors and soil properties for regionalizing crop suitability based
on soil and climate database. With a reliable database and knowledge of land
suitability one can delineate arable lands based on suitable crops or otherwise select
areas where crop(s) of interest might be suitable.
The booklet of Ritung et al. (2007) focuses on simple guidelines for
evaluating land suitability and exemplified its use on the tsunami-affected coastal
areas of Aceh Barat District, especially for tree crops. The current booklet refers to
Ritung et al. (2007) for approaches and methodology in land evaluation and focuses
not only on perennial crops, but also annual crops for the entire area of the district.
The land use recommendation map, as presented in this booklet, provides
range of prospective crop options in each soil mapping unit (SMU) based on soil and
climate characteristics. The recommendation covers the area that have been used
for various kinds of crops as well as areas of idle lands that potentially can be
developed for productive agricultural systems. In its applications these crop options
should further be filtered with market, land tenure status and the direction of district
agricultural development plan.
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