Farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use | Hacker News Reader

Farmers facing fertiliser sticker shock may cut use

reuters.com

114 pointsNoRagrets118 comments

While not the focus of this article, I'm curious how much of a reduction in fertilizer use we'll see in Iowa and the ramifications for water quality. Overapplication and lack of buffers has lead to incredibly high levels of nitrates making it into the rivers. Because of this, Des Moines is starting on a new $30M well because every year the algae and nitrate levels become too high for safe consumption. It's gone to the Iowa Supreme Court, but no remedy has been required of the communities upstream.

The most of the last two summers the local lake has had an advisory to not swim or do water sports because of the algae. Another article interviewed a water quality professor who basically said "There's no other comparable city that has this issue. Not being able to use the river as the full water supply because of nitrate levels is unheard of."

https://www.iowapublicradio.org/ipr-news/2021-04-22/des-moin...

I guess the Toledo (the Ohio one) Water Crisis was lost on them.

Could happen to any city on the Great Lakes.

> Lake Erie, which is a source of drinking water for the Toledo water system may have been impacted by a harmful algal bloom (HAB). These organisms are capable of producing a number of toxins that may pose a risk to human and animal health. HABs occur when excess nitrogen and phosphorus are present in lakes and streams. Such nutrients can come from runoff of over-fertilized fields and lawns, from malfunctioning septic systems and from livestock pens.

https://neiwpcc.org/information-center/neiwpcc-reprint-serie...

> It took a serendipitous slug of toxins and the loss of drinking water for a half-million residents to bring home what scientists and government officials in this part of the country have been saying for years: Lake Erie is in trouble, and getting worse by the year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-say...

This has become a huge issue all over the country where there is a lot of farm land next to lakes & rivers. Another big issue is salt from water softeners & products dumped on roads & driveways to remove ice in the winter.

I'm curious if there exists any companies working on some type of large water supply cleaning method as I don't see people slowing down or reducing any of the above.

Making mostly-clean water into clean water with reverse osmosis is pretty viable.

It's far cheaper than the reverse osmosis of seawater done in many parts of the world.

Nitrate levels in Iowa were sometimes dangerously high when white settlers first arrived in the early 1800s. (I have no doubt before then too, but I don't have information on what the native tribes or fur trappers dealt with). Nitrates are a natural process in soil, that is what makes Iowa so great for corn farming. Yes farmers are adding more, but even without farmers there would be a problem.

Farmers actually care about this - any nitrate that runs off is nitrate that they paid for and didn't use (or nitrate that they have to pay to replace). That doesn't mean they know how to solve the problem

The problem is agricultural practices that lead to increased runoff, not the amount of nitrogen naturally occurring in the soil or the amount applied.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/20...

"Nitrate levels in Iowa's major rivers have increased more than threefold since the 1950s, but have stabilized — and even slightly declined — in recent decades, according to an in-depth review of available research."

By the way, ammonia is basically the easiest market for clean hydrogen (makes WAY more sense than hydrogen for transportation). Ammonia actually doesn’t use hydrocarbons for feedstock at all; it uses nitrogen from the air and hydrogen (usually produced via steam reforming of natural gas, but can be made easily with electricity, as was common before the 1950s when steam reforming took off). It takes about 1kg of hydrogen per 5.7kg of anhydrous ammonia. So if you can make clean hydrogen for $2.5-3/kg, you can make clean ammonia for under $500/tonne in feedstock costs. The current price of anhydrous ammonia has reached above $1300/tonne in some areas of the US in the last few months.

Companies looking into making synthetic natural gas or hydrogen for transport really ought to be focusing on this as near-term low-hanging fruit where you have the option of actually eliminating steam reforming needed for fossil fuels and use electrically synthesized hydrogen as a direct feedstock instead.

Ammonia may be a good option for fueling merchant ships.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54511743

Electrolytic hydrogen projects for this purpose are popping up now.

"Scatec partners with Fertiglobe and the Sovereign Fund of Egypt to develop green hydrogen as feedstock for ammonia production in Egypt"

https://scatec.com/2021/10/14/scatec-partners-with-fertiglob...

In 1960 Egypt built a large electrolytic hydrogen plant powered by hydroelectricity from the Aswan Dam, also for making fertilizer. Now renewable electricity from other sources is reviving electricity-to-ammonia systems.

In energy terms, the [fertilizer] industry is dominated by the Kima plant at Aswan which at full production would use 7.6 x 10^15 joules of energy per annum to produce 112,000 tonnes of nitrogen as prilled calcium ammonium nitrate. The plant was built in 1960 to utilize the spare hydropower available from the Aswan Dam to produce hydrogen by electrolysis for ammonia manufacture. The plant has operated successfully since its inception and is currently one of the largest plants in the country.

From U.S. Department of Energy report, "An Assessment of the Energy Requirements and Selected Options Facing Major Consumers Within the Eyptian Industrial and Agricultural Sectors", 1978

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/5610349

One interesting side effect of these electrolytic hydrogen projects may be cheaper heavy water (deuterated water) and deuterium. The Norwegian heavy water plant that was famously sabotaged during World War II [1] was primarily a fertilizer plant that made electrolytic hydrogen using hydroelectricity. Electrolysis concentrates deuterium in the water left behind in the production cells, due to ordinary light hydrogen being liberated from water faster (kinetic isotope effect). Electrolysis is a very expensive way to make heavy water alone, but if you need to electrolyze a lot of water for hydrogen anyway, heavy water can be a much lower cost co-product.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage

"Dirt to Soil" by Gabe Brown might start getting more popular. He started investigating no-till, etc. after several successive years of crop failures and thus not being able to afford the normal inputs for industrial farming.

Adopting no-till techniques will save soil but won't appreciably reduce your fertilizer use. I'd even go so far as to say if you do it right the soil will be healthier.

But if you use cover crops and especially rotate out of alfalfa you can safely reduce nitrogen use because of the carryover of nitrogen in the soil.

All the no till people I follow don’t use chemical fertilizer(eg JM Fortier). They do add compost to their soil but that’s not fertilizer.

Zero till is a mainstream commercial cropping technique and has been for decades.

I guess I am referring to regenerative organic no-till in particular.

Okay. Cropping requires nutrient inputs though, and there's not much way around that. Nitrogen fixing and such are helpful but not able to supply all requirements.

Composting and this kind of organic farming is a nice boutique niche, but realistically it would be unable to sustain the food requirements of the world without being prohibitively expensive. Fertilizers based on petroleum and other mined minerals is the only options for that.

I’m making a solar powered farming robot that is open source and designed to help perform some of the labor that makes these processes more expensive. (See my profile).

There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs. And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer.

It’s interesting to think about where the money goes in our society. Let’s say we never broke up unions in the USA, and wages rose along with productivity instead of stagnating after 1980. Then we could be using more expensive farming methods, which make healthier communities, and yet people would be able to afford it. This is perhaps more similar to how things are done in France, for example.

There’s a lot that goes in to making any commodity relatively cheap or expensive. I think probably healthy soils and healthy foods are worth paying more, but we should make sure our economy functions in a way that everyone can afford food, of course.

> There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs.

What is one way?

> And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer.

People need food to live and lots of people don't have much money. It's very easy to say we're addicted to cheap fertilizer when you can afford to pay premiums for your biodynamic organic food. Billions of people do not have that privilege.

I had intended to suggest that solar powered farming robots are one way to reduce costs.

As far as people’s ability to pay, you seem to have glossed over my section where I point out that it is policy decisions, not some natural occurrence, that leaves so many unable to pay more. This is true both for within the United States where I live, and for the world at large. Whether or not people can afford higher food prices is something we have control over. We could ease restrictions on collective bargaining and unions could petition for their wages to increase. You may think that is a bad idea, but nonetheless you’d have to agree that is a policy decision that could result in higher wages. And so, whether or not “we” can afford to buy more expensive food is not out of our control.

Well I didn't consider machinery improvements to be an alternative to chemical input cost reduction, but I guess if they reduce costs then it is the same end goal that's true.

But I think the nutrient input will still be required in the form of petroleum and mineral based fertilizers though because alternatives to that I think are not only very costly, probably much more than total machinery and fuel costs now (which are roughly on-par with fertilizer inputs of the cheap stuff today), so I don't know if you could make up for the entire cost difference. If you did with your machines, I guess you would still get people wanting the cost savings of cheap fertlizers. I also don't know if they would scale enough to provide enough food.

Fertilizer is not a neutral product. Adding fertilizer destroys the biodiversity of the soil leading to sicker plants and the need for even more additives in the form of pesticides and fungicides to stave off problems caused by unhealthy soils.

So ideally you would replace chemical intensive farming with regenerative organic. Regenerative organic does require more hand labor. What I am saying is that robots could reduce the labor requirement, making it easier to scale regenerative organic. There are a whole host of benefits to this process, cost is not the only concern. In fact people are willing to pay more for their products.

See this 5 part lecture if you want to understand the process I am talking about end to end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hBUOdv2vn8

> Fertilizer is not a neutral product.

I'm not sure what neutral means here, but if it means adding or removing something from the system then sure. Growing and harvest is not neutral either, which is why you need other not-neutral processes to replenish what was depleted. This is not negotiable whether it's compost or nitrogen fixing bacteria or whatever.

> Adding fertilizer destroys the biodiversity of the soil leading to sicker plants and the need for even more additives in the form of pesticides and fungicides to stave off problems caused by unhealthy soils.

Modern farming techniques absolutely cause a holocaust of life, wiping out as much animal, plant, fungus, and other life as possible while leaving the crop. It's also the most cost effective way to mass produce food crops.

> So ideally you would replace chemical intensive farming with regenerative organic. Regenerative organic does require more hand labor. What I am saying is that robots could reduce the labor requirement, making it easier to scale regenerative organic. There are a whole host of benefits to this process, cost is not the only concern. In fact people are willing to pay more for their products.

Regenerative organic does not avoid the need for the nutrient inputs. That's the thing. It replaces fertilizers with compost and nitrogen fixing, but that's not free and if you scale it up to meet global food production it would probably be much more expensive. Nitrogen for example takes a lot longer to fix than you can apply fertilizer so you would need more land to achieve the same rate of nitrogen use by crops. Compost itself has nowhere near the nutrient density of fertilizers and would become scarce. Before the days of intensive agriculture and before most pesticide and herbicide chemicals and machinery, back when people had to use compost and legumes and things to get nitrogen into soil, guano become one of the biggest industries in the world because of how much more productive it was than those prior techniques. It resulted in such big efficiency gains, that the huge costs of running guano mining operations on remote islands and sending fleets of wooden sailing ships across vast oceans to ship the product were more than covered by the cost advantages at the farm.

No till people I follow (just few in USA and one in Ireland) ended up with adding huge amount of compost. Mulching with compost. Almost like starting with a new plot. For this you need to import compost. Where I live you can buy compost as much as you want but quality varies. So I wonder how this can work at scale. Maybe using different no till techniques I do not know.

It’s true. Sometimes called no-dig by Charles Dowding or “deep compost mulch system” but folks in the USA, that doesn’t scale well. For JM Fortier and Curtis Stone for example though, they do a minimal tillage system with soil amendments but I don’t believe they do heavy application of compost regularly. They do take advantage of a flail mower and a power harrow to compost leftover green matter on site, which reduces waste.

And I love RED Gardens in Ireland!

Gabe Brown goes a step further than a simple no-till philosophy. He promotes a very dense grazing of cows as well as cover crops which do bring fertilizer back to the soil.

This is the most relevant quote I could find on his website. I can guess that some may quibble over the "chemical" modifier in front of fertilizer, but I remember his book going more into discussing the reduction in fertilizer use, so I'd start there if you are curious.

> The misuse of chemical inputs (pesticides, chemical fertilizer and herbicides) is also detrimental to soil life. For this reason we do not use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, GMOs, and glyphosate. We are working hard to eliminate the use of herbicide. http://brownsranch.us/soil-health/

And his farm has above-average yields compared to other area farms, but also way higher profits. Brown Ranch practices Regenerative Agriculture.

If I was president I'd ask Gabe Brown to run USDA.

Exactly. I watched one of his presentations. His burn rate is quite low since he needs many fewer inputs to farm.

Someone posted this link in some other discussion where he came up. I found it fascinating and what you mention as well as much of what your sibling posters do is in there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk

I don't know what kind of crowd that "Sustainable Agriculture's annual symposium" pulls but I found the number of people in the audience quite small unfortunately.

There is a government agency that goes around trying to teach farmers how to farm in a way to bring fertility back to soil life, and have even parterned with people farming with notill to talk to conventional farmers.

Despite going around making presentations for years, it is still a hard sell to farmers.

Examples (and I am paraphrasing not quoting):

"What if my crop goes bad? Or hail? How do I deal with pests?" "Polycropping means that you'll have some kind of crop even if some of them don't do well, or the market crashes on one of them"

"I can't run my farm and make a profit without the subsidies" "I was able to get off of subsidies and my farm is more profitable and resilient than it had been before."

"I'd still have to get manure from somewhere and prices will go up" "I run a livestock operation on the fallow fields. They help fertilize the fields until I put crops back on them. I sell both crops and livestock."

And so on.

Much like science advances with the death of the older generation, farming advances as the old farmers die. The average farmer is something like 55 years old. Young farmers are far more willing in generation to try new things.

No till is standard farming practice these days. You can't get government subsides in many cases if you do traditional tilling. (there are other types of tilling allowed - they are much better for the soil)

Well ... notill is something that some indigenous people had as a practice. I think we lost a lot more in our shift to modernity. We've been living on this narrative that what comes next is necessarily better than what came before, and while there are some progress, that narrative doesn't hold up to be universally true.

https://www.atnesa.org/contil/contil-shetto-indigenous.pdf

If folks thought notill is so revolutionary, wait 'til they see perennial food forests and agroforestry. Those also have indigenous roots.

> Well ... notill is something that some indigenous people had as a practice.

Okay, what were their yields per acre? Or is the plan to go back to population levels of indigenous people?

It’s less about yields and more about ways of viewing and experiencing the world, which in turn changes the kind of questions people ask.

“What are the yield numbers for practice X?”

“How can we maximize yields?”

“How can we supply population size Y?”

“How do we grow food to standards that are sellable in grocery markets?”

“How can we keep grown produce fresh enough to transport them thousands of miles away?”

In contrast to things like:

“What makes for a healthy ecosystem (which includes plants, animals, fungi, and humans)?” (A farm as an ecosystem rather than a machine that produces food)

“How do we incorporate waste as an input to another living system within the ecosystem?”

“What can we grow locally that would support the community and reduce dependency on long-haul transported food?”

“What are the feedback cycles in our ecosystem and how can I design in a way to add more of such processes?”

“What small changes I can make to those feedback cycles that would create larger effects in the ecosystem?”

“What yields are we not incorporating into the design of our ecosystem?”

“How can I turn the margins into productive land?”

Most of the issues we have in our system in the US is due to the fact that we really don't have farms--we have gigantic agribusinesses.

Most of the "family farms" have been driven out of business or have had to scale up to industrial levels (thus becoming part of the problem).

How does "Regenerative Agriculture" address the scaling problem?

He is fond of saying he doesn't have the highest yields in his county (but IIRC he's in like the 90th percentile), but he does have the highest profits. Farming and software share that in common. People get fixated on gross revenue and over a long enough time frame gross revenue doesn't mean shit.

Edit: He's also farming on 16" of rain a year. If he can do it, so can you.

It is a very interesting book, which I just so happen to have read last week. Also I live only 15 miles from where he farms in North Dakota.

I just wanted to mention (based on the book only, I don't know that much about him otherwise but would like to tour his operation this summer) that his approach is so much more than no-till, which itself I would say is fairly well known. An insane variety of cover crops, livestock grazing, and business strategy (his son and direct to consumer aspects) are the most interesting parts of what he does.

Most people don't understand that fertilizer is made from petrochemicals. It's not old-fashioned manure.

And some of the toxic by-products of that production are then put into our drinking water instead of being properly disposed of

https://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/engineering/engineering-sho...

>The three fluoride additives used for water fluoridation are derived principally from phosphate fertilizer production.

Is fluoride in our drinking water a problem? I happen to like my teeth

Some locales (all of the USA, I believe) add it for the benefit of teeth.

(Like anything there's presumably a poisonous dosage! But) no, not a problem.

While it is typically railed against by crackpots, it also shouldn't be assumed to be safe/correct. We've been adding flouride to water for a long time, without much understanding of the risks, benefits, or proper dosage. Here's an article from the atlantic (not a crackpot news source) which goes into detail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/why-flu...

https://www.cochrane.org/CD010856/ORAL_water-fluoridation-pr...

Key results

Our review found that water fluoridation is effective at reducing levels of tooth decay among children. The introduction of water fluoridation resulted in children having 35% fewer decayed, missing and filled baby teeth and 26% fewer decayed, missing and filled permanent teeth. We also found that fluoridation led to a 15% increase in children with no decay in their baby teeth and a 14% increase in children with no decay in their permanent teeth. These results are based predominantly on old studies and may not be applicable today.

There is basically consensus that fluoride in the drinking water is good for teeth. The worry is that consuming it may have other negative effects unrelated to teeth. We know that fluoride in higher dosage isn't good to be consumed, but what about long term, small dosage exposure?

Yes.

Pity the nut jobs use up all the oxygen saying it is method of disposing of toxic waste and a social control measure....

But it may come at the price of childhood brain development[1]. I haven't evaluated the merits of that study, but that's showing a significant effect in a peer-reviewed journal. In any event I'd say it warrants further study.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5285601/

If you'll forgive my use of an anecdote...

I stopped getting cavities when I started using a good electric toothbrush, not when I started drinking fluoridated water.

So no idea if the statistics bear this out, but personally I don't care much about the fluoride.

I stopped getting tons of cavities when I started drinking fluoridated water as a kid. I didn't have an electric toothbrush until well into my 20s. So I guess that's 2 data points? What now?

I wasn't trying to demonstrate that brushing trumps fluoride. I shared my experience in the hope it would spark interesting discussion.

I know a dentist in a suburb of a city that does not fluoridate. They said they can guess whether or not the patient grew up in the city or outside the city simply based on their dental history.

Why we need a third data point of course! :)

My childhood drinking water was not fluoridated and I've never to this date owned an electric toothbrush. I didn't have any cavities until my 20s.

What do we make of this?

Fluoride in water doesn't do anything for teeth. The fluoridation treatments dentists use are effective but that's a concentrated paste applied for some minutes to the teeth in a dentist's chair. Diluted fluoride in the water supply has zero benefit for teeth.

Research seems to disagree with you[1]. Do you have a citation for your assertion?

[1] https://cumming.ucalgary.ca/news/calgary-childrens-dental-he...

Would you take a couple point IQ hit in exchange?

I got in a heated debate with a fluoride crackpot and they annoyed me enough that I went to "do my own research."

This ultimately led me to some weird places of the internet but also to places like the CDC... who really didn't have strong language for its safety around developing brains. It was very "its safe, but we should look into why kids in adjacent neighbourhoods with flouride are slightly dumber than those without."

I won't post a link to this, do your own research. Having read a bit about it, I came away with a slightly changed view on fluoride.

The source of something doesn't tell you much about its health effects. A lot of life saving drugs are created using industrial processes involving many nasty chemicals. This is not too far from the logic of signing a petition against dihydrogen monoxide because it sounds like a scary chemical.

NPK is the acronym for basic plant nutrients. Others might know better than me, but you have those three (nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium) for primary fertilizer nutrients. Of those P is mined (apatite) from rock ore and K is mined from rock ore or brine. Mining and ore process has energy inputs couple to oil price, granted. Nitrogen is ammonia via HB, predominately with nat gas feedstock.

Sometimes we get down these tangents and it derails from the core topic. This is terrible and unwelcome news.

Most people don't understand that fertilizer is made from petrochemicals. It's not old-fashioned manure.

Not all fertilizer. But I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of it is made from chemicals.

Chicago's poop gets processed and spread on farms downstate, for example.

Just an hour ago I got a food delivery from a farmer who uses only her own livestock to fertilize her fields.

(As a side note, it's wonderful to see — since the pandemic — how many farmers where I live have set up web sites so they can deliver their goods from their farms straight to the doorsteps of people living the city, in addition to farmers' markets. So far, I get my beef, pork, eggs, some cheeses, and honey delivered right to my doorman. Still looking for a milk option that isn't raw, or $11.99/gallon.)

Phosphate fertilizer is mostly mined. Ammonia-based (NH3) fertilizers are made from atmospheric N2 via hydrogenation, and the source of the hydrogen can be water. The whole process (Haber-Bosch) can be renewably powered with no fossil fuels in other words.

"Can be" is pretty critical. Most hydrogen is currently produced from methane (natural gas) via steam reforming. The barriers toward renewable production are economic, not technological, but at current prices natural gas is a lot cheaper than electrolysis.

On the plus side, it's good to know that fertilizer isn't a blocker from going fossil-fuel free.

Fertilizer can be carbon free (ammonia from hydrogen from water + sun), but about 0% of the world's supply is that. All the hydrogen comes from natural gas.

Steel can be made carbon free, but so far it's all made in a blast furnace with a lot of coal.

Aluminium can be carbon free (electricity), but so far we reduce carbon electrodes and release a lot of CO2 because carbon is cheaper than using extra electricity.

All it would take is the right global tax or incentive structure and all these industries would quickly move over, saving us 20+% of CO2 emissions!

Sorry for being pedantic, but isn't carbon-free steel just iron?

The carbon in the steel is a tiny fraction of the carbon used to make coke which fuels the process.

This is similar to plastics. Sure, plastics use petroleum. However, if we quit burning petroleum for cars, suddenly we have 100+ years of petroleum reserves for plastics.

Oh wow, serious brain-fart on this side. Now that you say it I realize i was kind of being dense - thanks for spelling it out!

Pretty sure he meant carbon emissions, but technically you are correct, "steel" is a mixture of iron and a relatively small amount of carbon. As far as I know (but I am not an expert) there are not many applications for elemental (pure) iron.

"Steel can be made carbon free, but so far it's all made in a blast furnace with a lot of coal."

Most (think I'd heard 75-80%) of it is made in electric arc furnaces from scrap steel these days. This is a big factor in the Rust Belt's decline and Nucor's (and China's) advance: we made enough steel that now we have surplus scrap, and it's cheaper to melt it down and reform it than to dig more iron ore out of the ground and make steel in blast furnaces.

I thought aluminum production was also largely in electric arc furnaces, and the main CO2 contribution was generating the electricity used for it.

Edit: apparently it's about 70% of steel in the U.S. is produced by electric arc furnaces, and they produce about 85% less CO2 than blast furnaces. Aluminum is produced in electric arc furnaces, but with carbon electrodes, which release about 1/2 lb of CO2 for every pound of aluminum.

I'm not counting arc furnaces for steel because they don't make steel - they recycle already made steel. Also, the recycling rate for steel is partly only impressively high because a lot of steel is wasted during the steelmaking process - so it isn't really recycling either, merely a loop inside the manufacturing process.

This was one of the things I was taught as an environmental studies major: That Peak Oil does not just mean we need to develop alternative energy and alternative transportation. It means we need to also develop alternative means to keep producing enough food to feed our current population.

I remember this from awhile back about how food insecurity sparked instability in N. African and Middle Eastern countries

Lack of access to affordable food has proven to trigger revolutions and spark unrest across the world

https://www.csis.org/analysis/food-insecurity-conflict-and-s...

That seems like an obvious truth.

I thought the same thing, but I like to fact check

It’s a huge reason why food is relatively cheap in most of the EU, I believe.

I can't speak for all of the Middle East, but it is known that morocco buys enormous amounts of grain and stockpiles huge reserves for exactly that reason. Everyone knows that once bread starts missing, there's no going back. So while the state is very very bad at doing a lot of stuff, and is plagued with corruption at all levels, it's been reliably very good at getting grain and making sure the prices are fine no matter the costs.

I've had family members who were more or less in charge of the state procurement of grains, and they have always always put an emphasis on how seriously the whole thing is dealt with. I wonder how the current price swings are hurting the state coffer, though. But, once governments can't afford the subsidies, you get situations like what's currently happening in Kazakhstan.

Farmers are facing countless "sticker shocks" with the most important being water. Most farming is not either ecologically or financially sustainable.

Major changes are need to farming.

This is a serious problem. Developing world and food insecure nations will see heads roll and experience famine. Worried about global inflation on food.

This was my first thought after I understood what locking down the world meant. I wonder if the death toll with be worth it in the final analysis.

More "surprises" like this is coming in the future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_divestment

Most people are not aware that we have less than 60 years of phosphate reserves left. It’s not a renewable resource.

Wikipedia says 260 years:

> In 2021, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that economically extractable phosphate rock reserves worldwide are 71 billion tons, while world mining production in 2020 was 223 million tons. Assuming zero growth, the reserves would thus last for 260 years.

Phosphorus is one of the more common elements on Earth. It's more common than carbon, sulfur, or nitrogen (to name 3 other elements essential to life):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

Lower grade phosphorus-bearing minerals could also be refined to concentrate the phosphorus. But there's little current incentive to do so when the tried-and-true process starting with phosphate rock will be adequate for a couple more centuries.

have we ever "run out" of a non-renewable resource? Non-renewables just become more expensive when easily found reserves are exhausted.

That's a distinction without a difference. The end result is the same; we lose the ability to make use of the resource in question and have to design alternatives.

By that measure we ran out of copper a long time ago, yet I can still buy it at Home Depot. It's just crazy expensive.

Silphuim, passenger pigeons, and dodos. Previously, wolly mammoths (and undoubtedly others that we don’t know about).

Those are all renewable.

so is petroleum, if you can wait a few hundred million years

Fossil fuels probably are as well if you’re willing to wait long enough. No amount of waiting will renew one of the extinct species listed.

I dont think this would apply to coal. There are organisms that can use the wood that would otherwise need to fossilize to create coal. These organisms did not exist the first time round.

Do we have a viable genetic sample of slphuim to grow it again?

I certainly did not think so.

"The plant grew along a narrow coastal area, about 125 by 35 miles (201 by 56 km), in Cyrenaica (in present-day Libya)."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium_(antiquity)

I meant that in the sense in which it is true -- all of these things self-replicate. Up until we ran out of them, they were renewable.

They could also switch to less fertilizer intensive crops. I think soybeans require less than corn. Farmers commonly switch between the two depending on market prices. Not a farmer but I think I read it somewhere...maybe 80% sure of this...

Soybeans and corn can often be grown in the same areas, and corn uses more fertilizer than soybeans so your logic checks out. The problem is that corn produces more calories per acre than soybeans (or any other crop), so changing over large amounts of production could still result in a food shortage even if the total acres remains the same.

We could also cut the mandates for ethanol produced from corn- roughly 40% of corn grown goes into making it.

A lot of corn also goes to animal feed.

When I worked out the numbers, it was about 75% of US corn production going to ethanol and animal feed.

A lot of the other 25% is probably corn syrup.

Burning natural gas to make fertilizer to grow corn (a 2% efficient solar panel) to eventually blend with gasoline is uhhhhh, dumb.

The article, and the problems it references, aren't really expected to be a US thing - it's developing nations, and places where food is already harder to come by...

I'd imagine that the protein in soy is more important to the food supply than a simple measure of calories.

We could also stop feeding so much of these plants to animals and start feeding them to ourselves and cut our growing immensely. We’re feeding about 3/4 of our soybeans to animals, but they’re packed with protein that we can digest.

> Farmers commonly switch between the two depending on market prices.

Legume roots have nodules that cultivate bacteria that fix nitrogen. Farmers rotate their fields between corn and soybeans/legumes because the bacteria on legume roots restores the nitrogen in the soil, thereby lessening their fertilizer costs.

Biological Nitrogen Fixation: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/biological...

This is an inoculant with bacteria for soybeans: https://www.groworganic.com/products/soybean-inoculant?_pos=...

Plants with deep roots pull up nutrients from deep soil. I think corn and soybeans generally don't help with restoring the soil like native plants.

A chart comparing root systems of North American prairie plants and bluegrass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ecology/comments/bxoh43/a_chart_com...

China already suspended Phosphate exports in July 2021:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-exports-fertilisers...

A related problem is that seeds for next year's crop has gone up a lot also.

For example, last year peas for seed were about $8 per bushel. Now, $25 per bushel.

So both fertilizer and seed costs have increased; which changes the calculus of how many acres the farmer can afford to plant.

A more in depth look at the factors causing high fertilizer prices:

https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-dr...

tl;dr: high natural gas prices, weather caused production delays, COVID caused production/shipping delays, power shortages in China (a major exporter) resulting in lower production

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalyps...

This won’t be good for food prices.

The US Gov needs to act fast, like Trump did in 2020, to subsidize agriculture before this crisis culminates in food shortages.

Considering how much is overused and washes into rivers and oceans and creates dead zones. This is a really good thing. We over produce as is.

What an odd rationalization. This is NOT a good thing. Aside from empty shelves, prices will rise from lower production if nothing else and that can lead to all kinds of bad consequences from malnutrition to social unrest.

He's not wrong though. What he's describing is a silver lining. Optimizing fertilizer application to reduce waste is going to be part of the response to addressing climate change.

Food prices going up hurts the poor the most, especially base commodities like corn and soy.

The last cut in american over production resulted in the Arab-spring revolution wave and the Syrian Civil War.

Most of the nitrogen in our rivers and lakes causing problems isn't from farmers use of fertilizer. Farmers are in a low margin business and if they use too much nitrogen they make less money.

A lot of it used to be caused by manure runoff from large animal operations. But twenty or more years ago laws were changed and regulators focused their attention on correcting this problem. There are always exceptions but mostly this problem is fixed. Farmers have to file plans on which lands gets manure, complete with soil tests showing they're not overdoing it.

I helped farmers in the late nineties fill out these reports in my former career as an agronomist. Back then some larger farmers were either moving to composting or using the manure to power plants creating electricity.

So where is it coming from now? Lawn fertilizer! People over fertilizing their lawns.

So humanity's stupidest form of cultivation strikes again.

You seem to know what you’re talking about so I have a question. Is it possible that leaving fallen leaves on a lawn for a period of time can help to fertilize that lawn? I experimented with that on my lawn this past fall and while it’s too early to make any conclusions I wonder if there’s any prior art here?

Composted leaves will fertilize it somewhat, but if you just let leaves fall on your lawn, it tends to kill the lawn. I recommend raking into pile, and letting it sit for a year or so (fallen brown leaves compost rather slowly), then you can spread resulting compost. But, unless you have lots of trees, the amount of nitrogen in fallen leaves will be minimal (trees don’t like parting with valuable nutrients either).

Not an expert, just a gardener. Short answer: just letting leaves fall on your lawn for a period of time is unlikely to provide fertilization, in fact it may hurt your lawn, because the leaves will not break down fast enough and will instead cut off your lawn's access to air and sunlight.

Long answer: You need to break down the organic matter in the leaves through composting. To speed up composting you want the right proportions of both brown (carbon - your leaves) and green (nitrogen) matter, the right moisture levels, and access to oxygen, usually in a large pile to create the perfect environment for the microorganisms that break down the matter. Your leaves are a great base for your compost, I always use mine, but you will probably need to put a little sweat equity into it, as well as kitchen scraps, lawn cuttings, etc. to get the right proportion of greens.

> Lawn fertilizer! People over fertilizing their lawns.

Lawn fertilizer!? I didn't even know that was a thing! Why would you fertilize a lawn. Won't that just make it grow faster and therefore require you to mow it more often?

The worst part is people clean off the lawn clippings, which would just decompose into nitrogen that the grass needs in the first place.

I held a similar view about fishermen and nets. Fishermen is a low margin business and nets are a massive investment, and loosing one would cost a lot of money. Look at any picture of fishermen or a fishing town and there is always a large number of nets being repaired. Repairing nets is almost an icon for the industry.

So why does there exist a massive waste problem from nets being dumped in the ocean? The answer lies in large scale fishing fleets which is an industry that is not a a low margin business. For them the cost of repairing or properly disposing nets is a cost compared to just dumping them into the ocean, and even if they get fined the cost would be less than the savings.

Small farmers are in a low margin business, and yes, if they use too much nitrogen they make less money. They would also get fined by local government, risk loosing farming rights and so on. Large scale farming and factory farming is not a low margin business, and sometimes the cost of violating regulations can be seen as the cheaper alternative. There is always the option to let a sub company go bankrupt, and route the profits away from the costs. Those are options not available to a small farm.

This is exactly right. The regulations are “scale discriminatory”. Written with the “help” of lobbyists paid for by big businesses that fully understand these economics. Classic regulatory capture.

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