The N2 Dilemma: Is America Fertilizing Disaster?
In This Series
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The N of an era: America’s nitrogen dilemma — and what we can do about it
There are three things on which the mighty engine of U.S. agriculture depends: water, fuel, and synthetic nitrogen. Like water, nitrogen is elemental to life. It’s the essential building block of the plants we eat. Farmers remove it from the soil when they harvest the year’s crop, and they must replenish it for the following […]
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Tracking down the public-health implications of nitrogen pollution
Picture a hot summer day in California farm country, say 112 degrees. In the tiny community of Tooleville, surrounded by olive trees and orange groves, there’s one thing you won’t see here that you’d see almost anywhere else in the sunny state — kids splashing in backyard pools. “People don’t let their kids swim in […]
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New research: synthetic nitrogen destroys soil carbon, undermines soil health
Just precisely what does all of that nitrogen ferilizer do to the soil?“Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.”–Dutch saying For all of its ecological baggage, synthetic nitrogen does one good deed for the environment: it helps build carbon in soil. At least, that’s what scientists have assumed for decades. If […]
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To reduce nitrogen pollution, we need new farm policies
California dairy farmer Joey Rocha. Photo: Stephanie OgburnTurlock, Calif. — Joey Rocha tends 2,800 cows at his Central Valley dairy. That may sound like a large herd, but in California, Rocha is a mid-sized dairy producer. Taken together, California’s dairy cows produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy […]
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Our other addiction: the tricky geopolitics of nitrogen fertilizer
Your food doesn’t come from here, but it starts here: an ammonia factory. We burn through more of it per capita than any other country; and our appetite for it can only be sated with massive imports. No, not oil — I’m talking about nitrogen fertilizer. With only 5 percent of the world population, the […]
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How our food system is destroying the nation’s most important fishery
To understand our impact on nature, there is truth in the saying, “everything is connected.” Few situations illustrate this concept as dramatically as the agricultural wastes from the Midwest that contribute so seriously to the aquatic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Human activities and natural phenomena occurring on land masses combine to impact […]
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The dark side of nitrogen
Few people spare a thought for nitrogen. But with every bite we take — of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach — we are consuming nitrogen. Plants, including food crops, can’t thrive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil. The amount of food a farmer could grow was once […]
