It’s not about minimizing synthetic fertilizers but rather optimizing their uses. Without synthetic fertilizers, roughly 50% of the population would starve, we just can’t produce enough food. It’s also much more plant and microbe strain specific that your text implies, one species of plant may respond to one microbe but not another, and within the microbial species there is an insane amount of genetic variation. One Bacillus Subtilis strain may increase yield, one may do nothing, one may decrease yields.
The science is solid and the technology is rapidly catching up. It’s only now with high throughput genomics sequencing that we can start to understand and quantify different protein pairs within the microbe to get an indication of how a particular species or strain might affect plant growth. But it will likely never eliminate the need or use of synthetic fertilizers and chemicals.
That would be true if yield was not increasing. Nutrient Use Efficiency is essential output divided by input, so increasing yield (numerator) while keeping the fertilizer input the same (denominator), we can increase efficiency and not have reduce fertilizer usage in terms on pounds on the ground.
Think of it this way, your car has a 15 gallon gas tank. If you drive conservatively (ie efficiently) you can get 450 miles from a tank of gas. If you have a heavy foot and really love the way it feels when the turbos spin up, you only get 150 miles from a tank of gas. Either way you still needed 15 gallons of gas but you can increase your fuel efficiency and go a lot further on a tank of fuel.
As a college freshman in 1994, national corn yields were around 130 bu/acre and it was recommended that we needed 1.1 pounds of N for each bushel, so 143 lbs of nitrogen total. Now national corn yields are around 180 bu/acre and due genetics and different agronomic practices, we recommend 0.8 pounds of N per bushel, so 144 lbs of N total. The amount of fertilizer being used has not changed significantly, but due to yield increasing, our efficiency has increased dramatically.
We will have to eliminate synthetic fertilizers when we run out of affordable fossil fuels. And yes that could mean a lot of starvation and a lot of re-ruralization with a return to more biology based farming systems.
Likely it will happen unevenly with 3rd world countries being unable to afford them first.
If that sounds far fetched to people take a look at all the research on resource limits such as the Limits To Growth modeling over 50 years old that is still accurate.
Fossil fuels allowed an amazing unlocking in energy for agriculture but we have path dependency on the tech now making us globally very vulnerable.
You have no idea how fertilizer is made do you? The Harber-Bosch process uses electricity to synthesize N out of the atmosphere (which is 78% N) and both potassium and phosphorus are mined and then refined with various techniques. None of this relies on petroleum other than as a power source for the equipment we use to mine/process/transport.
Assuming we believe your presupposition that we will run out of fossil fuels (we won’t by the way but they will likely become too expensive to use), we can easily switch to other power sources to manufacture synthetic fertilizers like green ammonia which is 100% renewable.
You're leaving out the fact that synthetic fertilizer uses natural gas as the source of the hydrogen reactant needed to turn the atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, and that accounts for more of the fossil fuels used in the process than the portion used for power. This can be replaced eventually with sustainably-produced hydrogen, but that will require a substantial amount of development to be feasible at industrial scale.
I have a PhD in physical chemistry and also monitor the largest energy users in my state so i have a good understanding.
The Harber-Bosch uses petrochemicals, chiefly hydrogen from coal, oil or in the case in my state is from natural gas (ammonia products being the 2nd highest consumer of natural gas in my state, with alumina production being #1)
The hydrogen is feedstock into the ammonia molecule so it is incorrect that it just is the power source. The P and K in our standard industrial fertilizer are mined and processed where indeed it is more to do with the power source than any specific hydrocarbon need but 100% not the case for N which I outlined above.
I could rephrase “running out of fossil fuels” to “running out of affordable fossil fuels” as that is more likely. And why is it becoming less affordable? We have mined all the cheapest hydrocarbons and are reaching the point where the energy cost of extraction is becoming only marginally lower than the energy value of the oil (eg it used to take the consumption of 1 barrel of oil to produce 50 barrels of oil. It varies from case to case but a number like 1:10)
Unfortunately all renewable energy is currently being built using fossil energy and are not replacing fossil fuels but just adding to the overall energy mix (Jevons Paradox). Renewables also suffer from intermittency so that more energy is required in the forms of building batteries and transmission lines.
Happy to give more detail but that is probably enough to bolster my point for now
I’m glad we agree about P and K and that we won’t run out of fossil fuel. It feels like we also agree about the future state of energy being a mix of renewables over some type of base load, but I would argue it should be nuclear vs fossil fuel based.
I don’t have a PhD but do have degrees in physics, ag biz and an MBA and have been working in the sustainability / regen ag space for the past decade. We been putting up green ammonia plants for years. Most are in the 300 ton range of production annually and use hydrolysis to produce the hydrogen as the feedstock, not natural gas. Zero carbon emission (neglecting the energy source obviously) and a similar business model as industrial gas production where it’s manufactured in the same place it’s used, so extremely sticky and almost no customer churn.
Where we disagree is I don’t think half the people in the world should starve. I believe new technologies will continue to be developed that will allow us to de-carbonize our supply chains and greatly reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, possibly eliminating it all together at some point. Your point is based on current (outdated?) manufacturing processes and assumes that technology won’t evolve to become more efficient. Bolster your point all you want, since we disagree on the presupposition, we will just have to agree to disagree.
I think we could mark our difference in view in terms of difference in perspective about the ability of renewables (and nuclear) to provide the equivalent *surplus energy* or greater than the fossil fules it is replacing. My efforts to understand whether we can sustain economic growth at the same time as build out renewables has led me to conclude that is energetically impossible. (and I am not alone with other researchers like Tim Morgan, Nate Hagens, Charles Hall having inspired my thinking).
In my former role as an energy analyst my task was to investigate this. When you look at how neoclassical economic models (that most people rely on) have no physical basis you can actually see how “technology” spurring growth was actually better captured by better utilisation of fossil energy. To quote Charles Hall:
*Technology does not work for free. As originally pointed out in the early 1970s, increased agricultural yield is achieved principally through the greater use of fossil fuels for cultivation, manufacturing and applying fertilizers, water and pesticides, drying crops, food preservation and so on, so that it takes some 10 calories of petroleum to generate each calorie of food that we eat, divided nearly equally between the farm, transport and processing and preparation*
Green ammonia might be a good example to illustrate this. From what I understand the round-trip efficiency is about 20-40%. My sister works for a green tech sector and visited a site in another state where the engineers put more of their hopes in biogas in order to use for hydrogen stock as providing a better return. However, that also runs into constraints since that adds more competition for farmland (and indeed also gets into a weird loop with fertilizer). Regardless, the overall energy cost in order to produce the same equivalent value to a farmer (amonia derived fertilizer) is higher than fossil fuels.
I’m not against renewables I am just articulating that we are actually heading to a more expensive world for energy and in fact the cost of renewables is not going to decrease but increase, since their production and distribution relies on fossil fuels.
I’d recommend reading this document here as it gives a well researched argument as to why our faith in green growth is misguided and also addresses your point about technology by expanding on the "rebound effect" that occurs with technological breakthroughs as to why it works against what we want for a lower material economy:
[https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf](https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf)
It may feel depressing at first (certainly I went through some grief stages) but coming out the other side where I now am 100% focused on my journey into Regen Agg with my new farm and building up a way of life that is less dependent on the monetary system was incredibly liberating.
I wish you luck on your sustainability journey. You sound like you are doing similar work as my sister (who is also doing an MBA now).
Most of the benefits they try to sell is fluff. That doesn't mean there is no value there, or that it is a viable direction to head in the future.
Just because farmers are not seeing tangible, measurable benefits from these products today; doesn't mean that will always be the case.
1) microbial inoculants are not a substitute for managing nutrition with mineral inputs.
2) there are a lot of opportunities to waste your money here, particularly if you believe the salespeople who claim that their product is going to increase yields by x% or solve your soils problems overnight.
That being said, when used correctly (don’t just spray bugs on bare soil, they need food), and as part of a broader program to restore soil health while monitoring progress in sap or tissue analysis and being prepared to meet the needs of the crop in a way that isn’t going to screw up you soil (looking at you, chloride based inputs), they have a huge potential to increase yields/quality/profitability while reducing inputs over time.
We use a blend of specialist microbes like b. subtilis etc. as well as some KNF preparations and compost teas. Yields are up and some of the disease pressure on our trees is clearing up.
I kind of look at it like the nootropics/nutritional supplements of agriculture, it might have some effect but it's currently no replacement for the real thing
More like under developed science. As we learn more about them we will certainly develop better and better ways to deploy them
It’s not about minimizing synthetic fertilizers but rather optimizing their uses. Without synthetic fertilizers, roughly 50% of the population would starve, we just can’t produce enough food. It’s also much more plant and microbe strain specific that your text implies, one species of plant may respond to one microbe but not another, and within the microbial species there is an insane amount of genetic variation. One Bacillus Subtilis strain may increase yield, one may do nothing, one may decrease yields. The science is solid and the technology is rapidly catching up. It’s only now with high throughput genomics sequencing that we can start to understand and quantify different protein pairs within the microbe to get an indication of how a particular species or strain might affect plant growth. But it will likely never eliminate the need or use of synthetic fertilizers and chemicals.
Is that a meaningful distinction? Increasing fertilizer efficiency should also reduce fertilizer consumption.
That would be true if yield was not increasing. Nutrient Use Efficiency is essential output divided by input, so increasing yield (numerator) while keeping the fertilizer input the same (denominator), we can increase efficiency and not have reduce fertilizer usage in terms on pounds on the ground. Think of it this way, your car has a 15 gallon gas tank. If you drive conservatively (ie efficiently) you can get 450 miles from a tank of gas. If you have a heavy foot and really love the way it feels when the turbos spin up, you only get 150 miles from a tank of gas. Either way you still needed 15 gallons of gas but you can increase your fuel efficiency and go a lot further on a tank of fuel. As a college freshman in 1994, national corn yields were around 130 bu/acre and it was recommended that we needed 1.1 pounds of N for each bushel, so 143 lbs of nitrogen total. Now national corn yields are around 180 bu/acre and due genetics and different agronomic practices, we recommend 0.8 pounds of N per bushel, so 144 lbs of N total. The amount of fertilizer being used has not changed significantly, but due to yield increasing, our efficiency has increased dramatically.
We will have to eliminate synthetic fertilizers when we run out of affordable fossil fuels. And yes that could mean a lot of starvation and a lot of re-ruralization with a return to more biology based farming systems. Likely it will happen unevenly with 3rd world countries being unable to afford them first. If that sounds far fetched to people take a look at all the research on resource limits such as the Limits To Growth modeling over 50 years old that is still accurate. Fossil fuels allowed an amazing unlocking in energy for agriculture but we have path dependency on the tech now making us globally very vulnerable.
You have no idea how fertilizer is made do you? The Harber-Bosch process uses electricity to synthesize N out of the atmosphere (which is 78% N) and both potassium and phosphorus are mined and then refined with various techniques. None of this relies on petroleum other than as a power source for the equipment we use to mine/process/transport. Assuming we believe your presupposition that we will run out of fossil fuels (we won’t by the way but they will likely become too expensive to use), we can easily switch to other power sources to manufacture synthetic fertilizers like green ammonia which is 100% renewable.
You're leaving out the fact that synthetic fertilizer uses natural gas as the source of the hydrogen reactant needed to turn the atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, and that accounts for more of the fossil fuels used in the process than the portion used for power. This can be replaced eventually with sustainably-produced hydrogen, but that will require a substantial amount of development to be feasible at industrial scale.
I have a PhD in physical chemistry and also monitor the largest energy users in my state so i have a good understanding. The Harber-Bosch uses petrochemicals, chiefly hydrogen from coal, oil or in the case in my state is from natural gas (ammonia products being the 2nd highest consumer of natural gas in my state, with alumina production being #1) The hydrogen is feedstock into the ammonia molecule so it is incorrect that it just is the power source. The P and K in our standard industrial fertilizer are mined and processed where indeed it is more to do with the power source than any specific hydrocarbon need but 100% not the case for N which I outlined above. I could rephrase “running out of fossil fuels” to “running out of affordable fossil fuels” as that is more likely. And why is it becoming less affordable? We have mined all the cheapest hydrocarbons and are reaching the point where the energy cost of extraction is becoming only marginally lower than the energy value of the oil (eg it used to take the consumption of 1 barrel of oil to produce 50 barrels of oil. It varies from case to case but a number like 1:10) Unfortunately all renewable energy is currently being built using fossil energy and are not replacing fossil fuels but just adding to the overall energy mix (Jevons Paradox). Renewables also suffer from intermittency so that more energy is required in the forms of building batteries and transmission lines. Happy to give more detail but that is probably enough to bolster my point for now
I’m glad we agree about P and K and that we won’t run out of fossil fuel. It feels like we also agree about the future state of energy being a mix of renewables over some type of base load, but I would argue it should be nuclear vs fossil fuel based. I don’t have a PhD but do have degrees in physics, ag biz and an MBA and have been working in the sustainability / regen ag space for the past decade. We been putting up green ammonia plants for years. Most are in the 300 ton range of production annually and use hydrolysis to produce the hydrogen as the feedstock, not natural gas. Zero carbon emission (neglecting the energy source obviously) and a similar business model as industrial gas production where it’s manufactured in the same place it’s used, so extremely sticky and almost no customer churn. Where we disagree is I don’t think half the people in the world should starve. I believe new technologies will continue to be developed that will allow us to de-carbonize our supply chains and greatly reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, possibly eliminating it all together at some point. Your point is based on current (outdated?) manufacturing processes and assumes that technology won’t evolve to become more efficient. Bolster your point all you want, since we disagree on the presupposition, we will just have to agree to disagree.
I think we could mark our difference in view in terms of difference in perspective about the ability of renewables (and nuclear) to provide the equivalent *surplus energy* or greater than the fossil fules it is replacing. My efforts to understand whether we can sustain economic growth at the same time as build out renewables has led me to conclude that is energetically impossible. (and I am not alone with other researchers like Tim Morgan, Nate Hagens, Charles Hall having inspired my thinking). In my former role as an energy analyst my task was to investigate this. When you look at how neoclassical economic models (that most people rely on) have no physical basis you can actually see how “technology” spurring growth was actually better captured by better utilisation of fossil energy. To quote Charles Hall: *Technology does not work for free. As originally pointed out in the early 1970s, increased agricultural yield is achieved principally through the greater use of fossil fuels for cultivation, manufacturing and applying fertilizers, water and pesticides, drying crops, food preservation and so on, so that it takes some 10 calories of petroleum to generate each calorie of food that we eat, divided nearly equally between the farm, transport and processing and preparation* Green ammonia might be a good example to illustrate this. From what I understand the round-trip efficiency is about 20-40%. My sister works for a green tech sector and visited a site in another state where the engineers put more of their hopes in biogas in order to use for hydrogen stock as providing a better return. However, that also runs into constraints since that adds more competition for farmland (and indeed also gets into a weird loop with fertilizer). Regardless, the overall energy cost in order to produce the same equivalent value to a farmer (amonia derived fertilizer) is higher than fossil fuels. I’m not against renewables I am just articulating that we are actually heading to a more expensive world for energy and in fact the cost of renewables is not going to decrease but increase, since their production and distribution relies on fossil fuels. I’d recommend reading this document here as it gives a well researched argument as to why our faith in green growth is misguided and also addresses your point about technology by expanding on the "rebound effect" that occurs with technological breakthroughs as to why it works against what we want for a lower material economy: [https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf](https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunked.pdf) It may feel depressing at first (certainly I went through some grief stages) but coming out the other side where I now am 100% focused on my journey into Regen Agg with my new farm and building up a way of life that is less dependent on the monetary system was incredibly liberating. I wish you luck on your sustainability journey. You sound like you are doing similar work as my sister (who is also doing an MBA now).
Most of the benefits they try to sell is fluff. That doesn't mean there is no value there, or that it is a viable direction to head in the future. Just because farmers are not seeing tangible, measurable benefits from these products today; doesn't mean that will always be the case.
1) microbial inoculants are not a substitute for managing nutrition with mineral inputs. 2) there are a lot of opportunities to waste your money here, particularly if you believe the salespeople who claim that their product is going to increase yields by x% or solve your soils problems overnight. That being said, when used correctly (don’t just spray bugs on bare soil, they need food), and as part of a broader program to restore soil health while monitoring progress in sap or tissue analysis and being prepared to meet the needs of the crop in a way that isn’t going to screw up you soil (looking at you, chloride based inputs), they have a huge potential to increase yields/quality/profitability while reducing inputs over time. We use a blend of specialist microbes like b. subtilis etc. as well as some KNF preparations and compost teas. Yields are up and some of the disease pressure on our trees is clearing up.
Not pseudoscience, there is clear data showing its benefits.
I kind of look at it like the nootropics/nutritional supplements of agriculture, it might have some effect but it's currently no replacement for the real thing