Water erosion is the most deleterious form of soil degradation. Besides reducing the production capacity of soils for crops, it causes strong financial and environmental impacts, due to the nutrient losses associated with it. This research work was developed with the objective of quantifying water and soil losses, P, K, Ca, and Mg losses in runoff water and extracted P, and exchangeable K, Ca and Mg losses in runoff sediments, caused by rainfall erosion, in an experiment conducted under natural rainfall, in the period from November, 1992 to October, 2003, in the south of the region Planalto Catarinense, in Santa Catarina State, Brazil. The financial value of these nutrients were calculated, expressed in triple phosphate (P), potassium chloride (K), and limestone (Ca and Mg), which were lost through water erosion from an Inceptsoil with 0.10 m m-1 slope steepness, under the following three different soil management systems: (a) conventional tillage (CT), (b) minimum tillage (MT), and (c) no tillage (NT), in duplication. One of the replications was cultivated with soybean, wheat, corn, vetch, bean, oat, soybean, and fodder radish in a crop rotation scheme, and the other replication cultivated with soybean and wheat in a continuous double-cropping scheme. Particularly for this study, the pair of plots with the same tillage type was considered replicates, regardless of the difference in crop species cultivated in each of them. Unlike water losses, soil losses were strongly influenced by soil tillage systems and crop years. The annual monetary value of losses of triple phosphate (P), potassium chloride (K), and limestone (Ca and Mg) by erosion were relatively high, regardless of the tillage type. The loss in NT reached U$14.83 dollars per hectare per year, in MT U$16.33 per hectare per year and in CT U$24.94 dollars per hectare per year. Of these tillage methods, the mean annual monetary value loss in triple phosphate (P) fertilizer corresponded to 8.6 %, while in terms of potassium chloride (K) fertilizer and limestone (Ca and Mg) they corresponded to 76.8 and 14.6 %, respectively.
erosion costs; nutrients in runoff; soil tillage
