In the first post of this blog, I promised that I would talk about more than just phosphate. So before I get into some detailed studies about how scientists plan on dealing with the phosphate decline, I thought I would cover another, some would say more “important”, scarce plant nutrient.
Nitrogen is not only the most expensive necessary nutrient to apply in agriculture, but it can be loss quite easily in the field. The run-off of agriculture nitrogen causes soil and water pollution. It can also cause global warming through emissions of nitrous oxide.
But let’s be honest, nitrogen in agriculture is currently at quite a different place than phosphate. Nitrogen is renewable, whereas phosphate is not because we are never going to have a planet without nitrogen. However, it is still in a problem-state. Agriculture will not run out of nitrogen, but it almost wishes it could...
