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This paper analyses a local innovation in response to intense soil degradation in olive orchards of north-west Syria. Farmers developed a practice consisting of quarrying red clayey soil in valley bottoms and applying this soil to hillslope olive orchards with heavily degraded calcareous soils. A biophysical, economic and social analysis of the practice of soil application identified the opportunities and risks of this innovative soil management technique. On the basis of a pairwise comparison of nine adjacent treated and nontreated orchard plots, soil applications were found to increase soil depth by 36%, soil water availability by 28% and total available soil nutrients: potassium (+45%), nitrogen (+12%) and phosphorus (+6%). Olive yield increased by about 40%. A cost–benefit analysis found this practice to be economically viable within a large geographical area, and farmers scored the practice higher than alternative methods. A socio-economic analysis revealed its widespread adoption among different farmer types. The positive results of soil applications at the farm level explain its fast adoption. However, potential risks – including the further depletion of soil resources and the transfer of soil-borne diseases – limit the long-term sustainability of this locally developed practice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

9 pages, 5 tables, 1 figure, 22 references. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Instituto de Recursos Naturales y Agrobiología de Sevilla (IRNAS), Sevilla, Spain., Soil quality evaluation is the process of predicting the capacity of a soil to function. Due to the many possible soil functions, simple measuring of an individual soil parameter is not sufficient. These soil-quality parameters or indicators are grouped in physical, chemical and biological components. Land evaluation, which tries to predict land behaviour for each particular use, is not the same as soil-quality assessment, basically because the biological parameters of the soil are not considered by land evaluation. However, the process of evaluating soil is not new, and agro-ecological land evaluation has much to offer in this sense. A state-of-the-art review of soil quality evaluation and monitoring is presented in this paper, focusing on the possibilities of applying the accumulated knowledge from past studies of land evaluation. An agro-ecological approach is suggested to facilitate the monumental task of relating the nearly infinite list of soil quality indicators to the numerous soil functions, such as an application of MicroLEIS DSS to soil quality., This work has been developed as a part of the activities from the ‘SCAPE: Soil Conservation and Protection for Europe’ EU Concerted Action, 2002–2005, funded by the DG-RTD, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development Programme (Contract EVK2-CT2002-20016; coordinator Prof. A. C. Imeson)