The popular myths about nitrogen are counterproductive.

A single patent a century ago changed the world, and now, in the 21st century, Homo sapiens and the world we dominate have an addiction. Call it the nitrogen fix. It is like a drug mainlined into the planet’s ecosystems, suffusing every cell, every pore — including our own bodies.

In 1908, the German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to make ammonia by capturing nitrogen gas from the air. In the process he invented a cheap new source of nitrogen fertilizer, ending our dependence on natural sources, whether biological or geological. Nitrogen fertilizer fixed from the air confounded the mid-century predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others that global famine loomed. Chemical fertilizer today feeds about three billion people.

Kristian Birkeland and Sam Eyde had already synthesized nitrogen using nothing but electricity from hydro electric dams in remote Nowegian fiords. The Birkeland-Eyde process for the production of Norgesalpeter - Norwegian Saltpeter, i.e. calcium nitrate, was used until a cheaper method forced them to change. The company that they founded licensed the Haber-Bosch process and continued in business though they had abandoned their patented method. Natural gas was cheap so the economic contest between methods favored Haber-Bosch. That may not always be so.

But there's also an ahistorical misconception in the idea that nitrogen synthesis "ended our dependence on natural sources". It's analogous to claiming that atomic fusion ended our dependence on coal, a natural source, for energy. Nitrate brokers were scouring the world for fossil nitrate deposits and mining them to supply the military as well as agriculture since nitrates are the key ingredient of gunpowder. Wars were fought for control of such "natural" sources of nitrate.

You can tell when you see a nonsense argument by the use of the addiction meme. Unscrupulous grifters use hype rather than arguments since their theses can't stand scrutiny and they seek to stampede readers past their natural impulse to question and verify. The idea that nitrogen - like water, calcium and other nutrients which are ubiquitous building blocks of life - is a drug that we unfortunately have in every cell, is truly insane. Without it there is no life. A better analogy is to that other important gas, oxygen. Addicted to oxygen? Nonsense. It's not optional.

The problem is that we waste most of Haber’s fertilizer. Of 80 million tons spread onto fields in fertilizer each year, only 17 million tons gets into food. The rest goes missing, washing into ecosystems. This is partly because the fertilizer is wastefully applied, and partly because the new green-revolution crops developed to grow fat on nitrogen fertilizer are also wasteful of the nutrient. The nitrogen efficiency of the world’s cereals has fallen from 80 percent in 1960 to just 30 percent today. . .

Today, of 175 million tons of nitrogen applied to the world’s croplands in a year, almost 50 percent is from chemical fertilizer. It has raised the “carrying capacity” of the world’s soils from 1.9 people per hectare of farmland to 4.3 — and 10 in China, where applications reach twice anything seen in Europe.

The main reason that efficiency is low is the form of nitrogen used. Many nitrogen fertilizers are volatile, the nitrogen evaporates during handling. In China, for example, the use of ammonium bicarbonate (ABC) meant that the vast majority of the fertilizer never even touched soil. In recent times they have been switching to urea but it also is subject to loss at rates as high as 10% a day depending on how and when it is applied. Anhydrous ammonia is a gas which can simply leak away if not properly handled. Stable forms of nitrogen fertilizer such as ammonium nitrate and calcium nitrate are more expensive, but cheap fertilizers are a false economy when so much fails to reach the intended targets.

This is a technological problem, one that is being worked though it needs more support. That's the focus of those who are sincerely concerned about the environment, including the climate, rather than the sterile keening we hear from ignorant grifters exploiting our legitimate concerns.

A key insight about Haber-Bosch is that it reacts hydrogen with nitrogen to make ammonia (NH3), the simplist form of fertilizer. The nitrogen in ammonia isn't useful to crops in that form, but soil bacteria convert it to ammonium (NH4) and nitrate (NO3) which are useful to plants. It doesn't matter where the hydrogen comes from. It could come from splitting water (H20) or even pyrolysis of organic matter. No fossil carbon need be involved. And if the ammonia is further processed to a stable form then much less will be lost to the environment before plants can use it. This could even be done on a farm by farm basis using crop residues as feedstocks. Done right, the fertilizer could be a coproduct of biochar production and be adsorbed by the biochar, stabilizing the nitrogen in an admirable way since the biochar is also a useful soil amendment.

That's not the only improved nitrogen technology, and it would be beneficial to continue to invest in research to develop newer materials and production methods. We have neglected this important subject for many decades though some progress has been made by private concerns in the meantime. They have developed methods such as polymer coated time-release fertilizers that steadily dole out fertilizer as time passes, which increases efficiency of plant uptake while reducing losses to bacterial competitors and leaching.

The failures of journalism to provide useful and accurate information, preferring instead to write nonsensical scare mongering, are a disservice to society. They are all tabloids now that spew misinformation, disinformation, and factoids cherry picked for their shock value.

Now and then you read something that seems to be making a reasonable argument for rapprochment between conflicting camps.

Genuine discourse has broken down: You’re either with Michael Pollan or you’re with Monsanto. But neither of these paradigms, standing alone, can fully meet our needs.

Organic agriculture teaches us important lessons about soils, nutrients and pest management. And local agriculture connects people back to their food system. Unfortunately, certified organic food provides less than 1 percent of the world’s calories, mostly to the wealthy. It is hard to imagine organic farming scaling up to feed 9 billion.

Globalized and industrialized agriculture have benefits of economic scalability, high output and low labor demands. Overall, the Green Revolution has been a huge success. Without it, billions of people would have starved. However, these successes have come with tremendous environmental and social costs, which cannot be sustained.

Rather than voting for just one solution, we need a third way to solve the crisis. Let’s take ideas from both sides, creating new, hybrid solutions that boost production, conserve resources and build a more sustainable and scalable agriculture.

We already have that. We have always had that. Main stream agriculture - the other 99% of production - has always been utterly promiscuous about agronomic ideas since it isn't driven by superstitious ideology, it is driven by profit and true sustainability: being in business for the long haul. There isn't anything that is done by fringe growers that is not also done by main stream growers . . . except the things that don't work. The deficit is on the other side. Fringe growers have taboos that prevent them from using good methods employed by main stream growers.

Those who are intellectually honest and seriously engaged with the problem of agriculture can simply ignore organic fetishes and their advocates since they have nothing new or useful to offer. Everything they know and do is already part of mainstream ag and always has been. Instead, the focus should be on improving ag practices to incorporate emerging methods and materials so that progress continues.

We need a better class of journalists, environmentalists and political activists that are far better educated and have a true interest in progress and improvement. The best main stream growers are better than organic and always have been. The task is to help those who are less informed and skillful achieve those same levels of excellence. As technologies that support ever higher levels of measuring and monitoring develop these growers are able to do an ever better job of doing the things that they have always understood are beneficial but that they couldn't do on the massive scale needed to feed the world. It's time that we admitted the glaringly obvious fact that these are the best and brightest, the true experts, and listen to their wisdom and experience about what they have achieved and what they are doing to further improve their practices.

This may seem like a strange set of views for a fellow who is part of the small scale, local, environmentally sensitive segment of agriculture who produces premium products for those who are the most health conscious and environmentally caring, but it isn't. I can see that those who produce on the largest scales are just as concerned and astute, but they are constrained by current technologies. They can't use the methods that I use on the large scales at which they operate: not yet, but when it is possible then they will do so. They know the whole story, but they have to deal with reality.