About the role of gossip, mainly from media (including us), in myth making.

When Slashdot runs the slightly misleading headline, “Real Nanotechnology Getting Closer, Says Drexler” (with a link to the technology roadmap — lots of downloads!), the Tech Talk blog at IEEE Spectrum quite naturally reports this as “Eric Drexler has just been quoted as saying ‘Real nanotechnology is getting closer’”… and thus inadvertently reinforces the myth that so-called “real nanotechnology” has little connection with what researchers know is the real real nanotechnology, in the lab today — or at least, that Eric Drexler thinks so, and is rude about it, too. Supposedly. It’s a quote, right?

Well, no… But it’s a fine example of how myths take root and obscure reality.

On another side of the intellectual world, all but buried in ideology and crufted up with misinformation, is the gooey world of biology. Study highlights massive imbalances in global fertilizer use

Synthetic fertilizers have dramatically increased food production worldwide. But the unintended costs to the environment and human health have been substantial. Nitrogen runoff from farms has contaminated surface and groundwater and helped create massive "dead zones" in coastal areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico. And ammonia from fertilized cropland has become a major source of air pollution, while emissions of nitrous oxide form a potent greenhouse gas.

This has little connection with what researchers and practitioners involved with real use of fertilizers in real agronomic systems know.

There's no difference between fertilizers. Urea is urea whether it comes out of a retort or the excretory organs of animals. Ammonia is ammonia whether it comes from a catalyzed reaction of hydrogen and nitrogen in a pressure vessel or the action of soil bacteria living and growing in a pile of leaves.

In any case, runoff from farms is unconnected unless one assumes that farms can grow something, anything, without fertile soil. The emission of nitrogen gasses to the air happens everywhere that organic matter, water and bacteria exist. That's the nitrogen cycle. It's been going on since life began. Some bacteria fix nitrogen from the air, mineralizing it so that plants can use it, while others do the reverse, consuming the fixed nitrogen and emitting it back to the atmosphere as a variety of gasses from ammonia to nitrous oxide to unreactive nitrogen gas, the main component of the atmosphere and of use to no plants.

The problem isn't synthetic fertilizers, it's agronomic systems. The threat of runoff and gas emissions is the same from fields dosed with granules of mineral nitrogen or dosed with a plowed down green manure crop of clover or soya in preparation for sowing a cereal crop. The trick is to have all the mineral nitrogen required and desired by the cereal available at just the time that it is needed, increasing the percentage of nutrients that get into the plant rather than being leached away or consumed by soil organisms. It's an ecosystem, a competition, and test tube perfection isn't the goal. You try to win more than you lose, but be real: you will suffer losses.

The proper attitude is to investigate why losses occur and intervene to reduce them. For example, applying nitrogen in the form of ammonium rather than as urea, anhydrous ammonia or organic matter is already past the gas phase of the multi-step process of bacterial nitrate synthesis. And unlike nitrate it is attracted to many soil particles so it doesn't leach away readily, NH4+ rather than NO3-. Its positive charge makes it sticky in soil rather than being repulsed like negatively charged nitrate. This isn't a total solution, life goes on and bacteria will still consume it and in the end send it back to the air if not taken up by plants before then, but it's better.

There are many such practices that improve agriculture to get more benefit from nutrients while losing less to the environment. Managing soil PH and carbon content helps. Timing matters. Balanced fertility - having all the nutrients needed available at the right time in the proper proportions - matters. Water management matters.

These and other negative environmental impacts have led some researchers and policymakers to call for reductions in the use of synthetic fertilizers.

This is the brain dead approach. No need to use skill or knowledge, just hunker down.

"Most agricultural systems follow a trajectory from too little in the way of added nutrients to too much, and both extremes have substantial human and environmental costs," . . .

"Some parts of the world, including much of China, use far too much fertilizer," Vitousek said. "But in sub-Saharan Africa, where 250 million people remain chronically malnourished, nitrogen, phosphorus and other nutrient inputs are inadequate to maintain soil fertility." . . .

In China, where fertilizer manufacturing is government subsidized, the average grain yield per acre grew 98 percent between 1977 and 2005, while nitrogen fertilizer use increased a dramatic 271 percent, according to government statistics. "Nutrient additions to many fields [in China] far exceed those in the United States and northern Europe--and much of the excess fertilizer is lost to the environment, degrading both air and water quality," the authors wrote. . .

Zhang and his co-workers also demonstrated that nitrogen fertilizer use could be cut in half without loss of yield or grain quality, in the process reducing nitrogen losses by more than 50 percent. . .

In a 2004 study in west Kenya, co-author Pedro Sanchez and colleagues found that farmers used only about 6 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre (7 kilograms per hectare)--little more than 1 percent of the total used by Chinese farmers. And unlike China, cultivated soil in Kenya suffered an annual net loss of 46 pounds of nitrogen per acre (52 kilograms per hectare) removed from the field by harvests.

"Africa is a totally different situation than China," said Sanchez, director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. "Unlike most regions of the world, crop yields have not increased substantially in sub-Saharan Africa. Nitrogen inputs are inadequate to maintain soil fertility and to feed people. So it's not a matter of nutrient pollution but nutrient depletion."

The problem, in both China and Kenya, isn't just the raw quantities of fertilizer used. It is also the conditions and timing where it is used, and the form of the material applied. For example in the initial decades of increased fertilizer use in China since 1977 the government manufactured and provided nitrogen in the form of ammonium bicarbonate (ABC). It is unstable, but cheap. It decomposes into ammonia gas, carbon dioxide and water with the slightest provocation. Farmers may think that they are fertilizing their crops with it, but little ever gets into plants.

China is phasing out ABC in favor of urea. It's more stable, but still evaporates at a rate as much as 10% per day unless it is incorporated into soil and heavily watered. Even then there are loses since urea isn't useful to plants. Soil bacteria must convert it to nitrate (or to a lesser extent ammonium) and there are losses in the process since it passes through the ammonia gas phase.

When all of these factors are considered the narrative changes. A more informed analysis leads to utterly different prescriptions.

In the Midwestern United States, over-fertilization was the norm from the 1970s until the mid-1990s. During that period, tons of excess nitrogen and phosphorus entered the Mississippi River Basin and drained into the Gulf of Mexico, where the large influx of nutrients has triggered huge algal blooms. The decaying algae use up vast quantities of dissolved oxygen, producing a seasonal low-oxygen dead zone in the Gulf that in some years is bigger than the state of Connecticut.

Since 1995, the imbalance of nutrients--particularly phosphorus--has decreased in the Midwestern United States, in part because better farming techniques have increased yields. Statistics show that from 2003 to 2005, annual corn yields in parts of the Midwestern United States and north China were almost the same, even though Chinese farmers used six times more nitrogen fertilizer than their American counterparts and generated nearly 23 times the amount of excess nitrogen.

"U.S. farmers are managing fertilizer more efficiently now," said co-author Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment. However, environmental problems have not disappeared.

The task isn't to raise China and Kenya to US standards, it is to continue to raise US standards so that others can benefit too. Understanding soil and the nitrogen cycles as well as the nutrient requirements and life cycles of each crop allows targeted, properly timed nutrient application that gives more benefit for less cost with fewer external impacts.

My interest in these matters - expressed in many previous posts - is that to get the production I need I must import fertility. The less I import the better. A combination of home grown fertility (nitrogen fixing bacteria), soil chemistry management (PH, CEC, AEC, redox potential, soil life etc.), and an intimate knowledge of the life cycles and nutrient requirements of the forage crops that I grow helps me achieve these objectives and turn a profit. That's real sustainability. My reward for smart and hard work is that I get to continue to do smart and hard work until I drop and my place is taken by another (gender indifferent) fellow.

It doesn't matter to the plants whether I import fertility as forage, which animals turn into manure and urine and cooperatively spread fairly evenly on the land, or as manure or compost that I have to spread, or as little white granules or variously colored dusts that I spread with a great deal less work and cost. What matters is that the end result is well timed, balanced fertility. As it happens I do all of these things, opportunistically, since my end objective is to keep home and hearth together and groceries on the table, just like any grower, even those in China and Kenya.