The Nitrogen Problem [View all]

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The farming systems we are putting in place now will need to feed the 9-10 billion people that will inhabit our planet in 2050. This is a huge challenge.

One of the most, if not the most, important factor in sustainability is nitrogen. Plants need a lot of nitrogen to grow, and this is often the limiting factor in large-scale food production.


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The Solution

As is often the case with any complex problem, there is rarely a simple answer. If we want to optimize sustainable farming we need to consider the entire system, all inputs and outputs, all the land use, and all of the environmental impacts.

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It seems that a combined strategy using as much recycled nitrogen as possible, nitrogen-fixing crops, and optimally applied chemical fertilizer, can maximize yield per unit of land while minimizing environmental impact. This can be extra work for farmers, however, so they need an incentive to do this.

As the human population grows, however, it will likely become necessary to add new options. One intriguing possibility is genetically engineered crops that are able to fix their own nitrogen. Imagine a wheat variety that can fix nitrogen from the air – no need for nitrogen fertilizer.

Legumes are plants that can do this now. Actually it is bacteria that live on their roots that fix the nitrogen from the air. There is ongoing research to engineer cereals that are able to develop the same symbiotic relationship with these bacteria. This is a complex task, however, and estimates are that we are at least 20 years away from this goal.

Still, this is the kind of technology we need to be working on so that we do have more options in 2050 when there will be more than 9 billion human mouths to feed.

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Conclusion

A thousand years ago we were essentially mining our world for nutrients, and the reservoir was so vast that we did not have to worry about the entire system. That changes with the industrial revolution and the explosion of the human population. This was followed by the green revolution made possible by synthetic fertilizer, which caused further population increase.

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This is partly why I think the false dichotomy of organic vs conventional is harmful. An integrated evidence-based approach to best practices, without an appeal to an arbitrary ideology, is what we need.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-nitrogen-problem/