Wilfried Ehlers

Wilfried Ehlers

Wilfried Ehlers (born May 19, 1939 in Bremen ; † November 20, 2016 in Göttingen ) was a German agricultural scientist in the fields of arable and crop production and soil science . He taught at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . His main research interests were the water balance , soil cultivation and soil protection .

Life

Wilfried Ehlers, son of a customs officer, attended a mathematics and natural science high school in Bremen from 1949 to 1958. A two-year agricultural apprenticeship followed. From 1960 he studied agricultural sciences at the University of Göttingen and at the Technical University of Berlin . In Göttingen he became a member of the Lunaburgia Association . In 1963 he passed the exam to become a qualified farmer. Under Fritz Scheffer he received his doctorate in 1966 at the Institute for Soil Science in Göttingen with a dissertation on the exchange behavior of potassium ions in mineral soils. 1967/68 he stayed on a scholarship from the Göttingen University at the University of California in Riverside (USA). There he worked at the Department of Soils and Plant Nutrition on the diffusion of lindane in soil.

From 1968 to 2004 Ehlers worked initially as a scientific assistant, later in his career up to the academic director as a university professor at the chair for arable and crop production at the Institute for Crop Production and Plant Breeding at the University of Göttingen. For more than two decades he was directly involved in the first research program on ploughless agriculture and reduced tillage, which Kord Baeumer started in Germany in 1966 . As part of this long-term experimentation, Ehlers developed his own research fields in the border area with soil physics . In 1979 he acquired the Venia legendi for the field of arable and crop production. In 1984 he was appointed adjunct professor .

Research and Teaching

The arable land and its agricultural use was the central research field of Ehlers. In the foreground of his experimental work were questions of soil cultivation and its effect on physical, chemical and biological properties and processes as characteristics of soil fertility . In field tests, he determined the water consumption of plant stocks using soil-physical measurement and evaluation methods and related this to the dry matter yield achieved ( transpiration coefficient ). He was able to derive quantitative relationships between parameters of the root system and the water uptake of the roots. He found out that, in contrast to the turning plow culture, shallow mixing of the soil with plant residues on the surface ( mulch ) causes a drastic change in the soil properties. The stocking density of individual earthworm species increases significantly due to the calm soil and mulch . In numerous experiments at different locations, he was able to prove that plowless arable culture activates soil life , stabilizes the soil structure, promotes the infiltration capacity of arable soils ( rain digestibility ) and thus reduces the problem of soil erosion .

Ehlers was a passionate advocate of the thesis that the increasing use of powerful but heavy harvesters with a total weight of 50–60 tons (weight of battle tanks ) is damaging the soil. He therefore initiated several research projects funded by the German Research Foundation on the problem of soil damage compaction . He was able to prove the correctness of the thesis through his own field tests and through numerous survey studies on farms. He found out that the use of heavy technology over time creates subsoil compaction that cannot be meliorated , which causes a loss of soil fertility and contributes to environmental pollution.

The list of publications of Ehlers includes more than 130 articles in domestic and foreign journals, but also in national practice-oriented magazines. Informing the specialist audience and the general public has always been a particular concern of his. In two textbooks (1996, 2003 and 2016) he presented the state of knowledge about the dynamics of the water balance in agricultural crop production and made it accessible through an extensive bibliography. At the Göttingen Plant Production Institute, he supervised numerous foreign guest scientists. He led eleven doctoral students to doctorate.

Ehlers was a member of numerous scientific societies , including the American Society of Agronomy, the Soil Science Society of America and the International Soil Tillage Research Organization. From 1981 to 1985 he headed the soil physics commission of the German Soil Science Society . For many years he was a reviewer or co-editor of the scientific journals "Soil and Tillage Research", "Journal for Plant Nutrition and Soil Science" and "Archive for Arable and Plant Cultivation and Soil Science".

Textbooks

• Water in soil and plants. Dynamics of the water balance as the basis of plant growth and yield . Publishing house Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1996.
• Water Dynamics in Plant Production (together with Michael Goss). CABI Publishing, Wallingford, UK. 2003.
• Water Dynamics . CABI Publishing, Wallingford, UK, 2003, 2nd edition 2016.

Publications (selection)

• Soil moisture regime of loessial soils in Western Germany as affected by zero-tillage methods (together with Kord Baumer). In: Pakistan Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research Vol. 17, 1974, pp. 32-39.
• Observations on earthworm channels and infiltration on tilled and untilled loess soil . In Soils Science Vol. 119, 1975, pp. 242-249.
• Evapotranspiration and drainage in tilled and untilled loess soil with winter wheat and sugar beet . In: Zeitschrift für Acker- und Pflanzenbau Vol. 142, 1976, pp. 285-303.
• Germination depending on soil physical processes . In: Kali-Briefe Vol. 15, 1980, pp. 233-248.
• Soil physics research in the Federal Republic of Germany . In: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Soilenkundliche Gesellschaft Vol. 38, 1983, pp. 5–28.
• Editorial: The need for soil physics in tillage research . In: Soil and Tillage Research Vol. 4, 1984, pp. 1-3.
• Why are broad beans so sensitive to drought? . In: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft Vol. 101, 1986, pp. 558-560 u. 567.
• Transpiration efficiency of oat . In: Agronomy Journal Vol. 81, 1989, pp. 810-817.
• Root system parameters determining water uptake of field crops (together with Ann Hamblin, David Tennant, Rienk van der Ploeg). In: Irrigation Science Vol. 12, 1991, pp. 115-124.
• Soil compaction lowers beet yield - considerations on harmful compaction using the example of diluvial locations in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania . In: Die Zuckerrübe Vol. 5, 1992, 1992, pp. 268-274.
• Reduced tillage - ecological consequences and agricultural limits . In: Congress volume VDLUFA-Tagung Göttingen, VDLUFA-Schriftenreihe Vol. 35, 1992, pp. 35–58.
• On the transpiration coefficient of cultivated plants under field conditions . In: Pflanzenbauwissenschaften (German Journal of Agronomy) Vol. 1, 1997, pp. 97-108.
• Change in density and structural function of loess soils in southern Lower Saxony under arable use (together with Rolf Rauber and Knut Schmidtke). In: Land Use und Landentwicklung Vol. 44, 2003, pp. 9–18.
• Heavy load in the field (together with Rienk van der Ploeg and Rainer Horn). In: Spectrum of Science, August 2006 issue, pp. 80–88.

Scientific film

• Our fields - endangered by heavy agricultural machinery? (W. Ehlers with the collaboration of Th. Mähner, R. Horn, C. Wiermann, O. Larink, S. Schrader, M. Langmaack, D. Werner, K. George). VHS and DVD video, color, 32.5 min., Institute for Scientific Film, Göttingen (responsible W. Stickan, F.-U. Fanelli), 1998, No. C 2004. - The film was awarded two international Awards excellent.

literature

• Retirements: Wilfried Ehlers . In: CSA News for members of Crop Science Society of America, Soils Science Society of America, American Society of Agronomy Vol. 49, H. 10, 2004, p. 15 (with picture).
• Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 2007 . Bio-bibliographical directory of contemporary German-speaking scientists. 21st edition, KG Saur Verlag Munich 2007, Vol. I, p. 712.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary notice in the Göttinger Tageblatt, December 10, 2016 , accessed on March 11, 2017.
2. ^ Address directory of the Lunaburgia connection from September 1, 1996, p. 3