Many fruit plantations are usually performed in ridges for various reasons including, escaping from a clay horizon, improving overall soil quality and drainage, among others. Normally ridges are built using the surface horizons, producing a mixture of soils layers, and therefore changing the quality of the soil at the rooting zone.

We were interested in studying the changes in soil properties when building ridges in a flat alluvial soil that was planted with avocado.

A detailed soil mapping using SoilOptix technology ^TM was performed at two times: 1) over bare soil before building the ridges and 2) after avocado planting over the ridges. Twenty-nine soil layers were produced in each case and compared pixel to pixel. As expected, significant changes were observed after building the ridges. Spatial differences were observed in most evaluated properties.