THE QUESTION IS, `WHY IS SYNTHETIC NITROGEN BURNING CARBON?’ Written by Nick Woodyatt Time and time again the main topic of conversation is Nitrogen. Whether from the side of the regeneration farmer who wants to turn the tide from the toxic, expensive inputs, or from the conventional farmer who still believes in the phrase, `Nitrogen builds yield’.
It is my belief that it is the excessive use of Nitrogen that has burnt the life out of our soils much more than any piece of machinery, and it is the farmers’ ‘addiction’ that has allowed the chemical companies to have such a hold over the industry. The abuse of Nitrogen has led to the overuse of other chemicals which has in turn led to the rise of certain issues such as some of the monsters we struggle with today, Fusarium and Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle, along with others. Science gives us a lot to be thankful for, right up to the time that science was hijacked by large corporations; thankfully, many farmers and consumers alike are now starting to wake up. The Dutch sum up Nitrogen use well in this poignant saying `Nitrogen is good for the father but bad for the son’. From a consumer’s perspective with high Nitrogen under question, the problem is much worse than we realise as most of the salad crops that are bought are just bags of nitrate with little nutritional value, which puts the 5 a day regime into great doubt. It is now also not uncommon to come across issues in food quality such as oranges and black currants with zero vitamin C. University of California studies show that vegetables can lose 15 to 55 percent of vitamin C within a week. A 2004 study evaluated Department of Agriculture data where the researchers found statistically reliable declines for six nutrients; protein, calcium, potassium, iron and vitamins B2 and C. It has to be concluded that the broad evidence of nutritional decline in our food from intensive 34 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
systems ran on high nitrogen and pesticides seems difficult to dismiss. What do we do about this? This problem started in the middle of the last century when farmers were told there was a new, easier way of growing more. The system of cover crops and manures went out of the window with the core principles of soil and plant health garnered before the Nitrogen boom of the 1920s, and was replaced by lorry loads of synthetic Nitrogen because it was cheap, but only a limited few had worked out the damage it was going to cause. Since then, we have been confidently strolling down the road of burning off all of the good stuff out of the soil, which led to not only a decline in soil itself but also of course, resulted in lower field health and quality, and yet rising costs.
I can’t argue that synthetic Nitrogen has helped feed the world, but at what cost? From the outset, it has been assumed that synthetic Nitrogen would build organic carbon even though the truth was exactly the opposite, which is one reason for the global climate change that we are seeing. The thought was that the more Nitrogen you apply, the more growth you get, ergo the more carbon dioxide is pulled from the air. What is now being seen is that synthetic Nitrogen stimulates certain soil microbes which then feast on organic soil carbon, once that carbon is used up the bacteria alter their DNA to survive on ever increasing amounts of Nitrogen. As organic
matter is used up, the soils natural ability to store organic Nitrogen runs out. A large amount of Nitrogen then leaches away, fouling ground water in the form of nitrates, and entering the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas with some 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. In turn, with its ability to store organic Nitrogen compromised, only one thing can help heavily fertilised farmland, keep cranking out monster yields: more additions of synthetic Nitrogen meaning onto the treadmill we go… Almost from the start, farmers put far, far more Nitrogen onto the soil than the crops could utilise, meaning that we started very early on to pollute our water and seas, and tightening our soils pushing out the most important part of it, air. The trouble with synthetic Nitrogen is that it can complex with organic soil carbon, oxygen, and water. This leads to the soil tightening up pushing us to apply more and more, hence a favoured phrase of mine, ‘the moron (more-on) approach.’ A recent researched study has suggested that for every 1kg of Nitrogen that is applied to the soil that isn’t taken up by the plant, we lose 100kg of organic carbon. It is easy to see that intensive farming together with high doses of Nitrogen, with only around 50% efficiency, can already start to cause heavy damage to the environment and atmosphere, giving a large release of CO2 from our soil into greenhouse gasses. Obviously, the excess usage of Nitrogen has not just meant higher Nitrogen bills, as I touch on above, we see compaction, erosion, lack of water ISSUE 11 | OCTOBER 2020
