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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I've studied the impact of fertilizers on natural gas consumption, and the figures are stunning. If we were able to reduce fertilizer use by just 1%, we would save meaningful amounts of energy. If we could eliminate it entirely, it would be as big of a breakthrough as the green revolution.

It is a shame about the for-profit commercialization, but I think it's worth remembering that such things do sometimes result in faster implementation because the people working on it have more skin in the game. But either way, it will be public domain in 17 years worst case. I don't think that amount of time will make or break agriculture, and if you need 100% less fertilizer it's a pretty easy economic case.

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You'd reduce fertilizer usage if you could prevent farmers from over-fertilizing. Simply following directions would be a huge step forward. Unfortunately there isn't a technical fix for stupid.

There is more to fertilizer than just Nitrogen compounds so you would still need a fertilizer, it just wouldn't need to be as nitrogen rich. And the farmers will continue to over fertilize.

"And the farmers will continue to over fertilize."

The smart corporate farmers don't over fertilize, it costs real money. Research the technology that they use, satellites, GPS and automated tractors/spray rigs that adjust in real time for specific soil needs.

Where do you get the idea that they are over fertilizing? The vast majority of them are on slim margins and watch everything like a hawk so I find it unlikely, given the costs, and their equipment that they are rampantly over fertilizing.

Not to mention the fact that over fertilizing will often reduce crop yields. The idea that the runoff of fertilizer products into groundwater, streams, lakes and oceans must be the result of over fertilization is false. It's the result of gravity.

Good point about possible faster implementation with patent incentive. I would love to see the research on that.

I believe that was the entire point of it. Keeping invention a personal use secret just wasn't cutting it.

Patents are good. Patent abuse is not. They need to be better regulated.

If you had a memory leak in a software program, would you try to solve it by packing your structures 1% better?

Agriculture has been under constant optimization for 80 years, and a 1% reduction in ammonia consumption is equivalent to $1B a year worldwide.

I think your analogy is flawed.

You realize that world population is going to grow by 1% in a year, right? Congratulations, your 'optimization' was just undone. As were those of the previous 80 years.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many above-average intelligent people are moving quickly yet don't seem to wonder about where they are actually going. I guess they're just not as lazy as I am. Me personally, I'd rather have enough idle land and unpolluted water for free range beef and wild fish, but I guess some people set their sights quite a bit lower.

Ah, I thought you were talking about waste in the actual food production process.

But who says I disagree? Suggesting that improving agricultural efficiency is useless because of population growth is just a logical fallacy, a version of a Straw Man. You're suggesting that I don't think we need to reduce population, when what I'm actually saying is that this is independently a big deal. I believe they call this particular version of the Straw Man an "Appeal to Worse Problems".

I think improving efficiency is indeed useless because it does not address sustainability. I don't care if its 99.999 'efficient', you're either depleting the earth or you're not. Something 10% efficient could be 100% sustainable.

And since nearly every post I see on here is about efficiency, and not sustainability, I'm compelled to offer another view point.

Okay. I mean, I agree. But sustainable does need to be defined. I think the common definition is that sustainable means that it will work for the next hundred years, at which point conditions will have changed sufficiently that decisions made now will be poor.

But yes, point taken that work to decrease population in a humane way is very important and underrated by technology driven people.

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