Organic nutters are deceitful in general but never so much as when they are trying to "prove" that fertilizer is bad.

Organic farming has long been touted as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional agriculture. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) provides strong evidence to support that claim.

Writing in the March 6 online edition of PNAS, Stanford University graduate student Sasha B. Kramer and her colleagues found that fertilizing apple trees with synthetic chemicals produced more adverse environmental effects than feeding them with organic manure or alfalfa. . .

During the yearlong experiment, organically grown trees were fed either composted chicken manure or alfalfa meal, while conventionally raised plants were given calcium nitrate, a synthetic fertilizer widely used by commercial apple growers. Trees raised using the integrated system were given a blend of equal parts chicken manure and calcium nitrate.

Each tree was fertilized twice, in October and May, and given the same amount of nitrogen at both feedings no matter what the source--alfalfa, chicken manure, calcium nitrate or the manure/calcium nitrate blend.

One goal of the PNAS experiment was to compare how much excess nitrogen leached into the soil using the four fertilizer treatments--one conventional, two organic (manure and alfalfa) and one integrated. When applied to the soil, nitrogen fertilizers release or break down into nitrates--chemical compounds that plants need to build proteins. However, excess nitrates can percolate through the soil and contaminate surface and groundwater supplies.

Besides having detrimental impacts on aquatic life, high nitrate levels in drinking water can cause serious illness in humans, particularly small children. According to the PNAS study, nearly one of 10 domestic wells in the United States sampled between 1993 and 2000 had nitrate concentrations that exceeded the EPA's drinking water standards.

To measure nitrate levels during the experiment, water was collected in resin bags buried about 40 inches below the trees and then analyzed in the laboratory. The results were dramatic. "We measured nitrate leaching over an entire year and found that it was 4.4 to 5.6 times higher in the conventional treatment than in the two organic treatments, with the integrated treatment in between," says John B. Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science at Washington State University and co-author of the study.

If the same experiment was done but the calcium nitrate was applied as needed rather than just dumped on the ground twice a year leaching would be trivial. What they "proved" was that they either don't understand the nitrogen cycle in soil or that they are happy to put their thumb on the scales to give a false measure. They lied in other words.

This totally sucks! What farmers need is good information about ways to use fertilizer that eliminate adverse effects, not quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo. When fertilizer is applied often but in small amounts it doesn't migrate below the root zone into ground water or wash away into surface waters.

The reason that applying green or brown manure doesn't leach as much is that it is applied in small amounts, and is applied in a form that consumes mineral nitrogen to break down the proteins and amino acids to release more mineral nitrogen at a later date. It's released over a period of time. The combination of nitrogen deficit after application and timed release makes less available at any time, and less that can leach away.

Applying nitrogen frequently in small amounts, or less often in timed release compounds, achieves the same objectives: leaching is reduced and so less total nitrogen is needed. Less nitrogen! At almost $500/ton that's just what farmers want to hear. If they can make it pencil for additional costs of multiple passes through the fields they'll do it. This is what real scientists should work on. If methods to apply fertilizer more economically and slow release compounds are developed less nitrogen will be needed. This isn't the sort of thing to rely on fertilizer suppliers for since they would incur costs to alter their production methods, and reduce sales volume as well.

I also think that it would pay huge dividends to develop ways to explain the nitrogen cycle to farmers so that they could internalize that knowledge and so use nitrogen with insight. Currently few understand or want to understand. They want rules-of-thumb, heuristics that work more often than not. The words are weird, the ideas are foreign. A translation with cultural insight is needed.

The research team also compared the amount of nitrogen gas that was released into the atmosphere by the four treatments. Air samples collected in the orchard after the fall and spring fertilizations revealed that organic and integrated soils emitted larger quantities of an environmentally benign gas called dinitrogen (N2), than soils treated with conventional synthetic fertilizer. One explanation for this disparity is that the organic and integrated soils contained active concentrations of denitrifying bacteria--naturally occurring microbes that convert excess nitrates in the soil into N2 gas. However, denitrifier microbial communities were much smaller and far less active and efficient in conventionally treated soils.

What a crock of manure. Denitrifying bacteria convert every nitrate they can catch into N2 and N20. It has nothing to do with "excess", it's how they earn a living. When there are insufficient nitrates they starve to death. It makes sense that in a feast and famine world where they get dosed twice a year there wouldn't be a large population. It's amazing. If you look at this "experiment" with knowledge of the nitrogen cycle there are few mysteries. These wankers are just bad farmers that don't know how to use nitrogen fertilizer effectively.

This is common. I get this sort of thing all the time from hard headed farmers who are slow to learn and stuck in their ways. They'll do something new in a half-assed, lick-and-a-promise sort of way, and then claim that it didn't work, just like they expected. Ignorance defends itself.

So what is the point of this pseudo-experiment?

"This study is an important contribution to the debate surrounding the sustainability of organic agriculture, one of the most contentious topics in agricultural science worldwide," Reganold says. "Our findings not only score another beneficial point for organic agriculture but give credibility to the middle-ground approach of integrated farming, which uses both organic and conventional nitrogen fertilizers and other practices. It is this middle-ground approach that we may see more farmers adopting than even the rapidly growing organic approach."

Adds Mooney, "Organic farming cannot provide for all of our food needs, but it is certainly one important tool for use in our striving for sustainable agricultural systems. We need to explore and utilize all possible agricultural management techniques and technologies to reduce the very large global footprint of the needs to feed a population of over six billion people."

No, it's not a contribution, it's obfuscation. A real contribution would have considered the factors that cause nitrogen leaching and set up experiments to test different methods. Soils that have higher PH (less acid) but also have high organic matter, which tends to be acidic, hold onto nitrogen better. That may seem contradictory but it just means that the soil needs amendment with calcium carbonate or bio-char in addition to organic matter. If what these folks truly want is an integrated approach that both feeds the world's teeming billions and uses nitrogen parsimoniously then they ought to kick the organic religion and do some science.

Update:

It's also worth noting that the chicken manure and alfalfa meal probably exist due to fertilizer. Chickens, even pastured chickens, get the vast majority of their nutrition from grain, and that grain is usually produced with fertilizer. Alfalfa, though it is a legume that (in a sense) fixes its own nitrogen, gets tired after a while and needs help. Nitrogen is applied in the later years of a stands life cycle.

It is possible that the chickens were only fed organic corn meal, that was fertilized using organic manure (green or brown) and that the alfalfa was never given a nitrogen supplement, but each step in that chain increases costs while reducing production for a net decrease in benefit and a net increase in embodied energy for production. It can be done, but it makes no sense to do so.