The attached media story tells some things that we all ought to know: Nitrogen fixation anniversary: Modern agriculture needs to use fertilizer more efficiently. - Slate Magazine Growing enough food for 7 -> 9 or 10 billions will require more of this stuff. The direct energy requirement for Bosch/Haber is not there, but we could find it easily. It is not trivial. Author makes the generally accepted argument that in many applications, nitrogen fertilization could be done more judiciously. This could save money and energy, and reduce undesired transfers of nitrogen to surface waters and (as N2O) to the atmosphere. I don't think that this Slate writer goes off the deep end here, but perhaps that is a matter for discussion. A couple of things seem to go unmentioned. Part of the inadvertent fertilization of non-farm areas probably supports carbon sequestration, which, of course we love. Atmospheric CO2 clearly increases carbon sequestration, but only in places where nitrogen does not limit plant growth. Another matter is whether farmers have no clue about the nitrogen levels of their fields, beyond that described in the link. I don't quite see it that way. Colorimetric 'test kits' to measure soil N are inexpensive, easy to use, and accurate at levels generally found in agriculture (if you want to know soil N in typical forests, more cost&effort are required). If it is correct that such test kits are not widely used in agriculture, then I'd have to say that somebody is dropping the ball. Missing a trick. In short, wasting money. Also I mention that there is an 'Asian elephant' in the room. One very large country (you just guess ) is famous for over-applying N fertilizers. Last week I read that 500 (up to 600) kilograms per hectare are applied to tea gardens. Tea. This is just nuts. Even if we change nothing about the fossil-C combustion path and even if climate change is a hill of beans, if we don't sort out agriculture, feeding 9 or 10 billions will present substantial challenges. Finally, the explosion described at the end of the linked article seems immaterial to the matter at hand. I know we enjoy such details, and maybe a bit of blood is necessary in popular media. I might not have included it, and might not have got my thing published! Or, maybe I would have succumbed to the lure of the lurid. About 15 years ago I participated in a forest N-fertilization study also using ammonium nitrate. The stuff in the 50-kg bags had also got wet and was clumped up. It smelled of diesel, and if the implications of that are not clear, I could add more later. The students/technicians needed to weigh it accurately into baggies. They were pounding the clumps with steel hammers on a hard steel surface. I was shocked, but tried to describe the situation calmly. "There is only a small chance that by hitting in this way, you could cause an explosion. But if you do. the bags in this room will also blow and you will remove the walls and die. I would much prefer you to pound on the ammonium nitrate with a wooden implement, with a wooden surface underneath." They did change their procedures.
I grew up on a farm, and (step)dad is still there. I have no recollection of any N testing, or any neighbors mentioning it. As for dropping the ball, wasting money, there is plenty more of that all around. Tradition counts for a lot on many of those old family farms. There was a lot to be learned when I moved off.
Sounds like Slate feels nitrogen fertilizer is mis-managed. Probably true, as our environmental regulations in USA tend to have gaps in areas the public does not perceive as a problem. It seemed a little over-board to blame acid rain and smog on excess fertilizer, though. From a supply view point, at least we have ample nitrogen. Phosporous appears to be in very limited supply from a long term availability perspective, and is also needed for fertilizers.
The problems are not being ignored, there is active politics to support the pollution and keep the polluters from paying any of the environmental costs. We all know the corn mono crop for feed and fuel is causing a dead zone in the gulf. The government encourages the farms to continue the harmful practices, and provides them with financial incenives if they do. Factory farming is worse Chicken Pollution Lawsuit Against Perdue Determines Future of the Chesapeake Bay Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America - Pew Environment Group To me the polluting waste is a bigger problem than supply. Really all that manure could be reused as fertilizer instead of being a source of pollution. The government says go ahead and not worry about the pollution. Don't even bother trying to capture the methane or run off as you are excluded if you are part of the agriculture lobby. For a fascinating look at the mad scientist haber, who has saved so many from starvation, here is some information The Haber Process He was also the inventor of mustard gas. The article got zyclon B wrong, it was a haber employee, not him. He also did not invent the drug extasy, that was a colegue. He did study under bunsen, who the burner is named for. After being a key part of the german WWI effort, Haber fled Hitler and moved to Switzerland
Does not the Mississippi Delta have an overabundance of nitrogen fertilizer washoff? IIRC, this continues to be a problem. On the flip side, the U.S. is still a major food source for many countries. If a balance can be had with acreage yields and nitrogen overuse, that is, perhaps the best we can hope for. DBCassidy
US (especially corn) agriculture has much reduced N fertilization w/o losing yield. This has not shrunk the Gulf of Mexico 'dead zone', but there are probably 'soil memory effects' involved. Meanwhile, a large Asian country is N fertilizing all crops like crazy. Market distortions include fertilizer-cost subsidies. If I were really smart I could find a way to inject some sanity. The Lamotte test kit looks like the best, but it would need to be made more accessible in Chinese (and cheaper!). In the last few days I have read a lot of papers clearly aimed at getting published in the journals. That do not inform how to get the thing done at the local level. This looks like a tough nut to crack, but I think it is worth some effort. If I miss some new, interesting climate/carbon posts, it may be because I am working on this thing. Y'all carry on without me.
Maybe if we could all get back into having a garden to grow some of our own food could be a step in the right direction. Even apartment dwellers with a small balcony or a community garden could grow their own food. I try every year to plant seeds in a small garden I have and use very little nitrogen. I like it, as a hobby, getting dirty, the taste and satisfaction of your own vegtables and minimizing nitrogen usage. Years ago in my own neighborhood, everybody had their own garden. Many neighbors swapped their vegtables with other neighbors. It worked out well: neighbors got to know their neighbors, gardening clubs were formed, and a healthy hobby was created. Today, it is different, and not in a good way. Neighbors rarely have gardens, don't know each other, are detached from their community, too busy with "trying to have it all". DBCassidy
The powerful key here is that doing the right thing saves money. It exactly like Americans paying all kinds of extra money for vitamin pills. If you can hammer though some thick skulls that most of those daily vitamins are ending up in the toilet, then both money is saved and health is maintained. Excessive N fertilization is the same situation. The good thing is that saving money is a pretty hard thing to resist once all the neighbors start saving. China is no different than any other culture in this regard. Once the farmers know that their crops are optimally fertilized, then there are better ways to spend the money left over.
Can you tell that to the chicken factory farmers having all the waste run off pollute Chesapeake bay? They seem to have some powerful friends in the government.
What I would really like to tell the chicken factory farmers is that they are throwing money away. All the organic material is good for energy, fertilizer, etc. If just a couple of friends in the government could provide a tax break for those who actually make use of the (former) pollution at least one problem would start to solve itself. (Don't mistake this as support for industrial farming. That magnified the problem to start with.)
The only way to get the drillers in the midwest to stop flaring natural gas, a valuable product, but causes delays in pumping oil, is to make it illegal. I don't even know if these factory farms are profitable if they are forced to become decent neighbors, and have the clean air and clean water acts applied to them. These big polluters have big ties to politicians. I didn't even realize tyson had a line into bill clinton when he was govenor, when I pulled up the article on the more recent waste run off. We do know they help control congress, as factory farm lobbyists got the proposed law for the government to simply measure the amount of methane being released from these large polluters from being measured.
I certainly don't want to minimize the hurdles of stupidity presented by corporate and political short term profit thinking. Smart economics only work when matched with smart regulation, both of which are in short supply. What I have observed is once the hurdle is crossed, smarter organizations retain the economic lessons. Once the drillers in the midwest are forced to make a profit from the NG being sold instead of burned, they are slower to return to bad practices....(but will return on many occasions because we train so many business and political students to think thoughtlessly.)
Some of those same companies that capture gasses at wells in texas, flare it in North Dakota. The big difference is that in Texas it is illegal except for safety, and there are fines for waste. This got figured out in the 1940s in texas, but this wastefull practice continues on many of the big midwestern finds. The fertalizer and animal waste problems got negotiated in 2000 with a voluntary program for the gulf, and I am hopefull that doug is right, but the dead zone only shrunk last year because of lower flow caused by drought, the flow still has too many nutrients in it. The only way the factory meat farms will reduce is if they have to comply to the clean water and clean air acts, something that they seem to claim exemption from every time the regulatory agencies try to enforce rules already on the books, or congress talks about even measureing the problem. Really handling the pollution would only add a small cost to chicken, but if one producer is virtuous and cleans up, while the others dump waste they become relatively more expensive. In game theory the regulators, by lack of regulation are helping to make the problem worse. Think about steroids in baseball, or blood doping in tour de france. Some were doing it, so if you didn't you made less money or won less. The US government is complicit in this pollution dumping, just as tour de france really made an environment where the riders needed to dope to compete.
Like so much in the media, They slant and omit truth, and outright lie to promote ourtrage. I am an older, just retired North Dakota farmer. I can't speak for the entire nation of farmers, but I suspect it is little different no matter where you go. When I hear things like " farmers always over apply fertilizer, Farmers do not test for nitrogen levels in the soil, farmers get a subsidy to over apply fertilizer, farmers let all animal waste just run into rivers " My first thought is "you got to be kidding". Nitrogen fertilizer is a necessary but incredibly expensive input for farmers and profit margins are not all that great, so those who waste inputs do not survive long in the business. I dont know of any area farmer that does not carefully soil test every acre( fields are broken into a grid pattern using GPS and multiple samples are taken in every grid square.) It is an expensive process, done by the farmer or agronomy co, but worth it to save needlessly overapplying expensive fertilizer. Fertilizer tests are used extensivly and the common practice is more to underapply the recommended rate rather than overapply, remember that fertilizer is a major farming input cost. Many of the farm programs, especially the conservation programs like CSP, require annual soil testing, so they can monitor the fertilizer rate applied, how it is applied and when it is applied, and you better believe if you are overapplying, or at the wrong time, the fines are pretty severe. Animal waste, manure fertilizer just piled on the ground and allowed to wash into rivers ?? Not if the farmer has anything to say about it. the stuff has great value as a fertilizer, and is applied to the soil as soon as conditions allow. About the only time we see any manure going where it is not supposed to go is if a freak storm or other weather problems flood manure lagoons and cause an overflow. about the same conditions beyond the operators control that cause things like municipal sewer lagoones to overflow at sewage treatment plants . It happens, but rarely, and never intentionally. A subsidy to buy fertilizer so farmers can afford to over apply it ??. I say again, "you got to be kidding". I was active in farming for the last 60 years, and never saw any fertilizer subsidy, the cost is / was always on the owner / operator to buy fertilizer. Any intentionl overapplication brings swift fines for polution.
I don't think you are looking at the same situation. We have factory farms whose practice is to just let waste flow. Its a major environmental problem in chesapeak bay and the gulf of mexico. There were not huge factory chicken farms 60 years ago, but the articles I posted do go back to the 90s. Its been getting worse THe subsidy on planting is to plant corn. Because corn requires more fertilizr on the choice of government to increase demand for corn (feed and ethnol) increases the amount of fertilizer. This then washes into the gulf. I don't see a consiracy of individual farmers, it is more the mega ag interests like adm that cause this over application of fertilizer versus planting other non-mono cultures. Again 40 years ago the country did not produce this high percentage of corn, but government action has encouraged a switch over to massive factory farms requireing huge quantiities of corn to feed the animals, and ethanol requirements requiring more corn. Food industry pushes highly processed foods, almost all of it has some corn - corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, etc. We even have had the government put up tarrifs to make sure we use corn sweateners instead of cane sugar, which has moved some food processing to canada and mexico where sugar is not taxed as much to protect the corn lobby. It doesn't have to be this way. Bush administration had the epa regulate this run off to protect the everglades, which Florida was not doing. That precedent should make it easy for the Obama administration use the EPA in the same way to protect the Chesapeake bay and the gulf of mexico. It seems our environmental priorities are more towards blocking the keystone pipeline and some imagined threat from it, instead of these real problems that can be easily seen even flying over with an airplane.
The western ND oil patch is a real wild west mess. wells are being drilled and going online so fast that they cant build NG pipelines fast enough . The oil co's are allowed to flare NG for 1 year, then must capture it for pipelines or use it on the well site. Many small NG powered power generator systems/ NG to NH3 cookers are being built, but it takes time, thus the 1 year flaring allowance. Even so, It hurts to see things like this. The Bakkan oil patch from space at night. Google Image Result for http://aleklett.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/bakken1.jpg
Welcome Jon Hagen. I have no use for lies and not much for outrage. As far as I can see, US farmers have much reduced N fertilization including on corn. Some 3rd world countries are still pouring it on. I might try completely exempt US from the discussion if major outflow rivers did not cause coastal marine dead zones - but there they are. My thinking concerns global ag and global N, and how are all of the major players going to balance people feeding with chemical externalities. These issues loom large. I do not see yet that we have a good path overall. This does not mean that certain high-tech farms are not doing great. Probably they are. Mississippi-river nitrate concentrations along the reach should tell that story, and they are in the public domain. So it could readily be known. But my attention is elsewhere, where river chemistry is a state secret. Can you believe it?
yes, but it is very sad none the less. The gulf has the second largest dead zone in the world. There are many reasons, and bad individual farmers are not one of them, but.... the band aid of voluntary stuff done around 2000 is not enough. I know the state does not want to have drilling slow down, and that is exactly what a flaring law would do, but I live in oil friendly texas. If our state can tell drillers to slow down, I'm sure ND can to until pipelines get built. The oil will still be their in 2 years. But, I was mainly using that as an example to say that if drillers won't clean up and sell a valuable commodity without government regulation, how do we expect these huge factory chicken farms to clean up after themselves. In the long term lack of chicken s&%t regulation is more environmentally damaging than the flaring. Eventually infrastructure will get built in ND and flaring will greatly go down. Its just waste of natural gas and a tiny bit extra carbon dioxide. In the case of the giant chicken operations we may start killing chesepeak bay, with real unhealthy pollution.
OT here, but apparently there is some new (in US) agreement about best envtl practices for frakking. perhaps someone here can lead us into that.
