Two corn fields in Malawi, one fertilized, one not. Photo by john.duffell via Creative Commons/flickr.
Grist (http://www.grist.org/) is producing a must-read series on the role and impact of synthetic nitrogen in our lives: our food, our bodies, our soil, our waters. Nitrogen has always intrigued me, for as a farm kid it was the magic stuff we spread on grain crops and hay fields to make them grow. Without nitrogen we would have had no farm, no harvests, at least according to the practices preached and implemented in the 1950s and 60s. But the nitrogen story is vastly more complex: that a material created a century ago by a couple of German scientists to build bombs (synthetic nitrogen fertilizer was used to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building) instead created a population bomb via the "Green Revolution."
Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has written that about 40 percent of humanity is alive today because of the food grown with synthetic nitrogen, all produced with fossil fuels. (One could say that not only do we depend on fossil fuels, we ARE fossil fuels.) Another synthetic nitrogen by-product: the more than 20 "dead zones" in bays, gulfs, and estuaries worldwide because of excess nitrogen runoff from industrial agriculture. The "hypoxic" or dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico below the Mississippi River delta is a prime example, as is the dying Chesapeake Bay.
From Introduction to Grist Series: "...In the past 50 years, led by the United States, global agriculture has come to rely increasingly on a cheap, synthetic form of nitrogen produced in fertilizer factories that are powered by natural gas and other fossil fuels.
"Before World War II, when the fertilizer industry was in its infancy, farmers used very little synthetic nitrogen. By 1964, U.S. farmers were applying about 4.3 million tons annually. In 2007, the last year for which the U.S. Department of Agriculture has figures, farmers dropped 5.7 million tons on the nation's corn crop alone. We now know that the undeniable benefits of synthetic nitrogen come with serious costs, both to the environment and to public health..."
Part One: The Dark Side of Nitrogen
Stephanie Ogburn: "...The amount of food a farmer could grow was once limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure, or moving on to a new, more fertile field. Then, about 100 years ago, a technical innovation enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen, and voila! Agriculture's nitrogen limitation problem was solved. The age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers had begun...."
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also see: A summary of recent articles and papers on role of nitrogen and its impact in environment:
Too Much of a Good Thing: Our Costly Nitrogen Fix (via @YaleE360 @seedmag @mitpress @naturenews @sciencemagazine)
also see: Signs From Earth: After Borlaug: Another Green Revolution?
also see: At Land Institute in Kansas, Prairie Pioneer Wes Jackson Seeks to Reinvent the Way We Farm (via @NPR)
Richard Harris: "...The problem, Jackson explains, is that agriculture in most places is based on practices that use up limited resources. The major grains, like wheat and corn, are planted afresh each year. When the fields are later plowed, they lose soil. The soil that remains in these fields loses nitrogen and carbon..."
also see: Future Think: 2020 Visions: Researchers Look forward...(via @naturenews)
Soils: David Montgomery, University of Washington: "To avoid the mistakes of past societies, as 2020 approaches, the world must address global soil degradation, one of this century's most insidious and under-acknowledged challenges. Humanity has already degraded or eroded the topsoil off more than a third of all arable land. We continue to lose farmland at about 0.5% a year -- yet expect to feed more than 9 billion people later this century. During the twentieth century, the Haber-Bosch process (allowing the mass production of nitrogen-based fertilizers) and the Green Revolution effectively divorced agriculture from soil stewardship..."
also see: The End of Plenty: National Geographic June 2009
Below: Wheat Harvest, Struthers Farm, Washington State. The bounty of American and world agriculture since the end of World War II has been created in large part by the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Photo by Scott Butner from Creative Commons/flickr.
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