Synthetic, or “chemical,” nitrogen fertilizers are bad for the environment, but “organic” fertilizers are good. ... Right?
Well, not exactly.
Sri Lanka: A Cautionary Fail
Nowhere has this been more poignant in recent times than in Sri Lanka, where green idealism and a priori assumptions led to catastrophic crop failure last year. The country is still struggling to overcome the resulting economic crisis.
In April 2021, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa led his country on a path that would transform it from a thriving food exporter to an importer of rice and other crops, in need of emergency economic assistance. The Sri Lankan government banned the use and importation of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in a naïve “great experiment” in green policy-making and self-reliance. [1]
As it turns out, policies based on idealism don’t tend to work well on the ground, as many land managers and agricultural advisers know all too well. Nevertheless, this myopic nitrogen-cutting strategy hasn’t slowed down, with similar approaches being sold to nations worldwide.
What went wrong, and why did the “great experiment” fail so catastrophically?
Can Organic Farming Feed the World?
The Bible envisions a world of peace and plenty—an agricultural utopia where “everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree.” Ideally, if every family had enough land with time to cultivate it and grow their own food, an organic approach would be realistic.The problem is that few have the wherewithal, time, or ability to purchase land and work a small-acre farm. Additionally, most of the world’s population is congregated in large cities lacking open spaces; many others live on nonarable or unproductive land, like nonirrigated arid lands or lithic (shallow and rocky) soils. So, the world depends on large, industrial-scale farms where a strictly organic approach is economically unprofitable and pragmatically unrealistic.
Organic farming requires a great deal of hands-on management, and transporting organic sources like manure is prohibitively expensive for large low-margin farms already stretched by rising fuel costs. Certainly, a gradual movement toward increased use of organics is very important to maintain soil health, in addition to being a responsible way to utilize organic waste. The problem is that governments and ideologues have moved too fast—far too fast for the soil and society to adjust.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) and other globalist groups are enthusiastic fans of the “17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” among which are zero hunger (No. 2) and climate action (No. 13). The SDGs were originally put forward by the United Nations, “as a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all,” and to “address the interconnected global challenges we face” and ”are designed to leave no one behind.”
“Human life depends on the earth as much as the ocean for our sustenance and livelihood,” the SDG website reads. [1] “Plant life provides 80 percent of our human diet, and we rely on agriculture as an important economic resource and means of development. Forests account for 30 percent of the Earth’s surface, providing vital habitats for millions of species and important sources for clean air and water; as well as being crucial for combating climate change.”
The world is in the midst of a clash of worldviews—with agriculture, food production, and sustainability at the center. The WEF, like The Club of Rome before it, implicates humanity as the cause of the world’s environmental ills and advocates for population reduction. By contrast, the ancient Judeo-Christian injunction to dress and keep the garden frames humanity as the caretakers of the land and encourages them to “be fruitful and increase in number.”
after Albrecht Dürer. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain
By the WEF’s own admission, “scientists are still undecided on the Earth’s ‘carrying capacity’—the maximum number of people it can support indefinitely—with estimates ranging widely between 500 million and more than one trillion.” [2]
Living Soil
The living soil environment is so complex that it defies generalizations and policies made in the halls of academia and meeting rooms. Differences in soil type—myriad combinations of sand, silt, clay, and organic matter—along with conditions such as temperature, precipitation, soil pH, parent material, and characteristics of the soil biome make the sum much more complicated than its parts.
Likewise, the complexity of the relationship between soils, plants, and the atmosphere makes climate change predictions nearly impossible to substantiate. The system—including the interconnections between the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle—is quite literally living, self-adjusting, and highly adaptable.
University studies, field tests, and statistical models can inform an integrated approach to managing the earth, but to best understand a patch of land, one needs to work it. Cropping systems must be carefully managed according to “best practices” that balance productivity with environmental protection. Humans are in a symbiotic relationship with the soil, and “ground truthing” assumptions matter more than endless studies. Just ask a Sri Lankan farmer how well the WEF ideologues’ management policies worked out.
The Nitrogen Cycle
If only there were a way to capture a fraction of this nitrogen and incorporate it into the soil to grow crops, we would have enough nitrogen to feed the world! But plants can’t utilize this essential nutrient in its diatomic form. In other words, atmospheric nitrogen is unavailable to plants.
Nature has a mechanism that converts this nitrogen into forms available for plants to utilize via a process called nitrogen fixation. Various soil organisms fix nitrogen by combining it with hydrogen or oxygen. Some live in root nodules of legumes like beans and peas; others are free-living in the soil. Lightning fixes small amounts of nitrogen, which enters the soil via rain.
Under normal conditions, the nitrogen cycle tends to be a closed loop, with low potential for nitrate leaching and runoff into waterways. However, natural systems alone can’t meet the crop production needed to feed the world.
Years of tilling native grasslands, extracting soil nutrients via heavy cropping, and failing to replace organic matter depleted the rich, humic soils of the Great Plains and resulted in the “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s. The U.S. government responded by creating the Soil Conservation Service in 1935 (now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service), tasking it with educating farmers and helping them implement sustainable soil management practices.
Organic matter sustains “living soil,” which is vital to the sustainability of the planet as well as beneficial to human health. The greatest benefits of organic inputs such as manure, composts, and green manures (i.e., cover crops) include increased soil structure and water-holding capacity, enhancement of soil life, addition of micronutrients (boron, chlorine, copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, zinc, and nickel), and other important benefits. However, the nitrogen contained in organic sources is not somehow more pure or nutritive than nitrogen that is produced synthetically.
Plants can’t utilize nitrogen in its organic form. Nitrogen bound in organic matter must be converted into inorganic forms—primarily nitrate and ammonium—by soil microbes in a multistep process known as “mineralization.” The rate at which this transformation occurs is largely determined by temperature, moisture, and soil properties. For instance, the process of nitrification (whereby ammonium converts to nitrate) takes about one to two weeks at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and 12 weeks at 50 degrees.
Only a small percentage of organic matter mineralizes in a given growing season, so an organic approach requires a gradual accumulation of a soil nitrogen reservoir over several years. The goal is to reap the cumulative residual nitrogen release from multiple years, like putting money into the bank a little bit faster than you spend it. By switching to a solely organic approach within a season, Sri Lankan farmers were forced to overdraw their soil “account,” and the soil went bankrupt.
Meat Free?
The WEF asserts that if we want to save the Earth, we can no longer afford to keep eating meat. As Sir David Attenborough proudly said of his personal efforts to “save the planet” by eating less meat, “We are omnivores, so biologically, if you could have a biological morality, you can say, yes we evolved to eat pretty well everything. But now we’ve got to a stage in our own social evolution in which that is no longer practical.” [2]
But this proposed solution sets up a dilemma: Reducing livestock means less manure for growing plants. Increased dependence on vegetarian diets also creates an increased need for nitrogen fertilizer. What to do?
There are really only two reasonable options: divide the land into smaller parcels for families to work, and thereby meet a portion of their own food needs, or supplement organics with synthetic fertilizer to make larger farms productive and profitable. Nitrogen is nitrogen. The plants don’t “care” where it comes from.
Synthetic Fertilizer Production Fixes Nitrogen
It turns out scientists did indeed discover ways to capture atmospheric nitrogen and convert it to forms plants can use. The fertilizer industry simply “fixes” nitrogen from the atmosphere, much as nature does.It also turns out that while the supply of atmospheric nitrogen is virtually unlimited, sources of hydrogen are not. So the production of ammonia fertilizer, for example, derives the needed hydrogen from natural gas or other hydrocarbons and combines it with nitrogen from the air to form anhydrous ammonia. When managed correctly, this technology offers a sustainable way to harvest nitrogen in step with nature’s nitrogen cycle.
While a portion of a crop’s nitrogen can and should be met by organic amendments, there’s no reason why farmers can’t add supplemental nitrogen to facilitate the high crop production needed to feed the world. Many farmers, aided by guidance from soil scientists and agency professionals, are very skilled at applying just enough. These are, after all, the kind of professionals who reversed the effects of the Dust Bowl through the application of sound soil management practices.
Environmental damage from nitrogen leaching to groundwater and surface waters and volatilization to the atmosphere doesn’t occur due to the source of nitrogen. Manures and composts can also cause these problems.