Farm in Kenya to produce fossil-free fertilizer on site
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Humanity, and especially the meat eating subspecies, is just a side effect of the Haber-Bosch reaction.
I've never heard of this linkage. I've always heard it was on account of cooking the meat, rather than eating more of it.
Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat.
In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.
Another thing.. Non fungicide treated plant based food seems to cause a amount of cancer. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food
Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult.
Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat.
Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.
offtopic: I disagree with the "subspecies" comment from GP - it was a bit inflammatory.
Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity? Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.
In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption. It’s less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than starvation.
Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely motivating to get alternatives working.
Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.
I expect people would do similar things in a real food shortage. If your starving buying a 5 gallon bucket of feed corn from the back of some guy’s truck suddenly looks appealing as do dog biscuits etc.
Farmers never stopped doing crop rotation.
Without fertilizers and especially pesticides the gains can be much larger though it forces investments into a wider range of equipment.
Some of the famines in the 1940s werent natural famines, they were due to war and colonizing forces, see:
https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 (linking to Winston Churchill associates with Indian famine deaths: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam... )
The other part of our predicament is that excess nitrogen impacts water supplies (see http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-nitrogen-problem-why-globa... ) and creates ocean dead zones ( see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html , https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ )
Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy as it could greatly reduce demand.
Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole.
However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.
It's the simple reason why a well-tended garden produces better produce than a corporate farm. There is simply more effort per plant in a garden. Tractors are currently too dumb to treat plants individually. They require plants to emerge, grow, harvest at the same time, and in the same way. Current modalities for pests/nutrition treat plants at the field level, not at the individual level. This creates lots of waste and externalities.
If there were a robustly built robot smart enough to deal with plant issues in and individual way then there is a huge slice of efficiency that could be gained. A field with the productivity of a garden. People have been trying to create this for a decade now and the limiting factor is the software. Maybe with the latest round of AI advances that will change.
This is my employer's bread and butter for many decades: https://www.ravenind.com/products/applications-booms
And yes, it's a lot of emphasis on autonomy now, but you'd be amazed at what just having better spray nozzles can do?
Cash crop farming is an incredibly capital intensive operation. Robots don't fix that.
In my hydroponics system, spray nozzles are one of the more expensive (for the size and purpose) components and they fail the most often. You’d think a brass nozzle would last years, but it’s going to need to be disassembled and cleaned before a year is up. Now imagine a huge tractor with high pressure bars that are lined with dozens of nozzles operating in a dirty environment and moving huge volumes of fluid. You’re going to get clogs, you’re going to have to clean them, and the application will be non-ideal quite often if you don’t. And that’s just the nozzles.
This stuff is so much harder and more complicated than it seems on the surface. Adding automation almost makes it harder because you really do want a human observing the system and ensuring it’s actually working.
And it's not just fertilizer, but other sprays, too.
Here, this looks thoroughly boring, but this guy is going over configuring one of our systems for fertilizer application... You can get an idea of some of the variables involved, if you can make it through :-)
But I think we're kind of in a hiring freeze. I think I just barely squeaked in before that.
The above is not a complete list of all the nozzle considerations I know of (I work for John Deere, but I don't speak for them), it is what I can remember in a couple minutes.
Mind telling your bosses to fuck off and let farmers repair their own equipment, please?
Or does that make absolutely no sense? I’m not sure how you can reliably measure fluid properties in order to get consistent spray patterns. It seems like it would be useful here, though.
You can tell I’m not an engineer :)
In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about nitrogen runoff.)
Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much water, you get worse flooding.
Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite. lots of shite.
You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow, but that only speaks to our dependence on them due to economic and social factors, not their inherent necessity to our ability to feed ourselves. Essentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end.
What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.
Thanks for backing me up. I am a woman tho.
Why does it matter if I'm putting syntheticly manufacturer nitrogen on my garden or if I'm putting the blood of farm animals, dried and powdered onto my crops?
The end result is the same. Blood meal is just lower yield
In the late 1800s - early 1900s this was done along many riverside cities in Eastern US and Canada, because of cheap hydro power generated by dams.
"In their search for a new process for producing cyanides for cyanide leaching of gold, Frank and Caro discovered the ability of alkaline earth carbides to absorb atmospheric nitrogen at high temperatures."
This 1913 book on calcium cyanamide manufacturing explains:
https://archive.org/details/cyanamidmanufact00pran/page/4/mo...
Nitrogen is obtained either by fractional distillation of liquid air, or by means of the copper oxide process. In the latter, air is passed through a red-hot mass of finely divided copper, suspended in asbestos or other inert material. The copper combines with the oxygen and allows the nitrogen to pass through. The copper oxide is easily recovered for use by reduction in situ with a suitable gas, such as natural gas.
The nitrogen used must be pure and dry, otherwise, at high temperatures, there is destruction of the carbon pencils, and of calcium carbide, according to the following reactions ...
I was thinking, surely they couldn’t be distilling air in large quantities in the early 20th century. But, yes!
The other, copper reduction method also sounds pretty intense.
Of course compost is also fertilizer, and farms have been producing that on site for a long, long time.
That said, huge win!
Apparently 'five times as expensive' according to Vaclav Smil (who is very pessimistic about rapid decarbonization) in How the World Works (2022):
> In terms of the second category, as I will detail in the next chapter, synthesis of the ammonia needed to produce nitrogenous fertilizers now depends heavily on natural gas as the source of hydrogen. Hydrogen could be produced by the decomposition (electrolysis) of water instead, but this route remains nearly five times as expensive as when the element is derived from abundant and inexpensive methane — and we have yet to create a mass-scale hydrogen industry.
See e.g.: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4079/3/2/11
By converting it to chemical energy, you can basically take the solar output that you get and use it. If you get more, you produce more, if you get less, you produce less. It is adaptable to the supply.
Right now the norm is to combine wastes, add it to drinking water, and then spend a lot of money to get the water out of it again.
Most dairy farms are very efficient at collecting all the waste the cows produce. They then empty the pits into a tanker truck and spray/inject it onto the fields. It goes a long way and helps complete the cycle, but your intuition is right, it alone is not enough.
Some of the nitrogen in your waste won't make it back to the plants. There are other micro nutrients that plants need that won't make it back either.
https://www.milorganite.com/what-is-milorganite
So they use the sewage from the existing treatment system, let microbes process it all, and then extract/dry those microbes.
I was more thinking about needing means to rethink our toilet/sewage system entirely with a focus on initial separation.
But yeah, scaling it up massively is the trick: https://www.oursoil.org/food-tank-soil-transform-human-waste...
Modern ag can build topsoil - sometimes at rates as high as 1mm/year!
Hardly. They're just using a new ammonia synthesis.
This development is exciting and hopefully spreads everywhere. Farmers being able to make their own fertilizer (at least on the nitrogen side), is a huge win.
The Germans pioneered modern fertilizer production in the 1890s-1910s.
In medieval times most of the population were farmers by necessity. In the UK, output per acre tripled and the proportion of the population in farming went from 60% to 20% in 1840. And the UK was still almost entirely self sufficient at this time, food imports only became substantial in the late 1800s.
Similar changes happened across Europe, though timing varied by country with the spread of industrialisation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolut...
Again, not commenting on the merits of this technology, I just think it's not correct to say that composting can't scale.
Before people could pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere, wars were fought over guano deposits, etc.
At this point, the majority of nitrogen in human biomass comes from the Haber-Bosch process.
(I’m not arguing against composting, to be clear!)
Just like in algorithms, making it an O(1) rather than O(n) solution, even with a large constant factor, can make an enormous difference over time.
Also suspect modern agriculture's conviction that the crop is an empty vessel requiring synthetic fertilizer is long overdue for reconsideration. Organic ag can be as productive as industrial ag, at far less energy/materials cost, but it will require much more human effort. While this is a very serious tradeoff to make I would argue it is worthwhile in the long run.
And if you compare the distribution of these solar panels with the distribution of the equivalent amount of nitrogen produced, I bet the panels require a lot less carbon for transportation. Not to mention not relying on a nitrogen producer (Russia), and additional uses for the panels.
The only safe measure is heat-treatment, but that is usually too expensive. In particular, it is more expensive than just using artificial fertilizer.
However, 100-200 lbs of fertilizer per acre is somewhat reasonable, so it’s probably on the order of 10-100 acres per ton of nitrogen atoms.
Source (this is an article about measuring available nitrogen, and their examples are in the 100-200 lbs per acre range):
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/Ext/corn/news/timeless/AssessAva...
So that’s about 240 lbs per acre of anhydrous ammonia.
So 1 ton/day (assuming metric tonnage), would be in the range of 8000 acres/year, though with obviously large error bars.
For example, farmers grow beans/legumes because they are nitrogen fixers. This reduces the need for fertilisers later on. However does mean that you might bot be able to grow as profitable crop in that time.
Soil health also comes into it. An allotment will be a shittone more productive per unit area than high grade arable land
The West has spent centuries modernizing itself to the point where there is a vast gap between the West and the rest of the world. Now that the West has a huge advantage, they want to start imposing moral arguments on the 3rd world nations as to why they should abide by the West's new set of moral codes, which handcuff the progress that 3rd world countries can make.
This feels like another example of where I bet it would be cheaper to do it in other ways (besides using Russian ammonia) but they decided to try the "green" way. It also feels a lot like how Monsanto tricked Indian farmers into using their seeds which required Roundup and then became indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the financial handcuffs put on them.
So I can completely sympathize why many poorer countries can see all these environmental moral edicts as being ways to keep them oppressed and tricked into not making progress independently from the West.
I think it's actually the exact opposite of this. The farm now has a fertilizer factory that produces fertilizer for free. They are no longer reliant on buying ammonia from big companies.
The West has spent centuries inventing and iterating on technology which is now available to the rest of the world, and has experienced how environmental hazards are created, which we want to avoid repeating.
The West also handcuffs itself with environmental morality (see infrastructure development in China vs the US). We have experience with pollution and want to avoid countries and continents of 1b+ people making the Earth uninhabitable.
There is a reason farmers use roundup as well: the other option to kill weeds is run a hoe through the field - which uses a lot more expensive fuel (read CO2!)