The Effectiveness of Stone Bund to Maintain Soil Physical and Chemical Properties: The Case of Weday Watershed, East Hararge Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia

Abstract

The study was conducted in Weday watershed in East Hararge Zone, Oromia Region to evaluate the effectiveness of stone bund SWC measures to maintain soil physical and chemical properties. The experiment has two treatments (conserved and non- conserved farm land) and three slope classes (3-8 %, 8-13 % and 13-18%) with factorial arrangement in Randomize Complete Block Design (RCBD) replicated nine times. Results indicated that soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), available phosphorus (Av.P), soil pH (H2O), Cation exchange capacity (CEC) showed significance differences with treatments (P ≤ 0.05). Conserved farm land demonstrated higher mean values of these parameters than non-conserved one. Soil textural fractions of sand, silt and clay and exchangeable potassium (ex.K) did not show significance variation with treatments. With respect to slope classes, soil textural fractions (sand, silt and clay), pH, Cation exchange capacity (CEC) organic carbon (OC), total nitrogen (TN), available phosphorus (Av.P) and exchangeable potassium (ex.) showed significant difference (P ≤ 0.05). Except the sand content all these studied soil properties’ mean values were higher in the lower slope than in the middle and upper slopes.  However, the higher sand content was recorded in soil under the upper slope class. Thus, stone bunds can reduce soil erosion problem in sloppy farm lands and yields some desirable effect on some soil physicochemical properties which in turn improve the productive capacity of the land.

Keywords: Conserved, Farm land, Non-conserved, Soil chemical properties, Stone bund.