9 ms·

Even if wind and water erosion were eliminated, modern agriculture is fundamentally a form of mining. Farmers grow crops that remove nitrogen, phosphorous, pot

Even if wind and water erosion were eliminated, modern agriculture is fundamentally a form of mining. Farmers grow crops that remove nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and a variety of other minerals from the soil. The crops are shipped to cities typically located on rivers or oceans. The crops are processed, eaten and the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other minerals are flushed into the rivers and oceans. The elements can be replaced as long as supplies of natural gas to fix atmospheric nitrogen and reserves of potash and phosphate rock last. But it is ultimately unsustainable.

windsurfer 7y ago
Over 95% of a plant is just hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon that it pulled from the air or water. Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  I disagree. Farming is surface mining. Maybe aquaponics and hydroponics are only reliant on water and nutrients. And we should probably switch to soilless farming more..but soil based farming is most certainly surface mining and the most destructive thing we can do to this planet.
  - gleapsite 7y ago
    Certainly prevalent forms of argiculture are akin to surface mining. My property is surrounded on three sides by a rotated field (corn, wheat, soy etc) and there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. However I believe there are forms of soil agriculture that aren't surface mining such as a short rotation coppice. The primary molecular structures being extracted are lignin and cellulose, which are comprised of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (that is, water and air sources).
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      I agree. But industrial fossil fuel based global Ag is brutal on the soil..top soil once gone will take years and years to form..if at all it does ..
    - schiffern 7y ago
      >there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. This presumption is incorrect. Do the math: 99+% of that mass loss is because of wind and water erosion, not plant growth.
      - lovich 7y ago
        Would his property not also experience the same erosion? I could see irrigation from the farming causing extra water erosion but wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste?
        schiffern 7y ago
        The acceleration of erosion on farms is mainly caused by tillage (plowing), the building of fast farm drainage networks (vs infiltrating water to recharge aquifers), lack of trees to block surface-level winds (vs winrows), and heavy biocide application which kills the plant roots/fungal hyphae/bacterial aggregates that hold soil together. >wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste? No because soil isn't waste, it's a valuable material.
        RhodesianHunter 7y ago
        No, because presumably his property has permanent plants with roots that retain the soil, while his neighbors are constantly tilling the land making it easily blown or washed away.
        lovich 7y ago
        I don't see how this isn't analogous to mining still. Coal mines clear cut mountains. A smaller portion of the mountain in the form of coal is kept and shipped. The other materials of the mountain are blown away as a side affect of the clear cutting operation. Farmers harvest crops from their land. A smaller portion of the land in the form of crops is kept and shipped. The other materials of the land are blown away as a side affect of the farming operation. Why are these functionality different other than one operation wants a mineral in the ground and one operation wants freshly harvested plants?
  - 11235813213455 7y ago
    Permaculture is not, it's actually enriching the soil (in terms of living organisms) and the local ecosystem, it's a sustainable farming method gaining popularity with the decreasing productivity of common intensives monocultures
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      I agree. But yield is much less. Especially considering land mass for Ag is shrinking and we will likely face an uncertain future because of climate change. Indoor Ag can be controlled. I use permaculture and biodynamic methods for orchards and perennials but annual row crops, tillage methods seem to be the best option so far. I am a fan of permaculture but I don’t know if it’s feasible everywhere and for all kinds of crops.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    No. That’s an incredibly ignorant statement that is unfortunately commonly believed by many people these days. We currently subsidize a type of agriculture that is very extractive. But farming isn’t inherently that way, and has only been that way for a few decades. I’ve seen the right way — working on a midsize farm that was producing a variety of crops and dairy from the late 1600s until around 2006. Techniques like crop diversification, rotation, low-tillage, etc it is very feasible to create a sustainable agricultural environment. Think about the tragedy of all of the incredibly fertile and water-rich land that fed NYC in New Jersey that is now subdivisions. Now “environmentally concerned” people are drinking half gallons of crushed almonds, sugar and water grown in arid areas with threatened water supplies. It does mean that you need to roll back the direct and indirect subsidy that creates exploitive markets. That means you don’t grow lettuce in the California desert. It also means seasonal vegetables and smaller scale farms.
    - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
      well.. world population in 1600 = 500 million current world population = 7.5ish billion expected population 2050 = 10 billion subsidies wont make a huge dent. population reduction might. ..but that would take 150-200 years if everyone stopped procreating after half a surviving child.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        None of this has anything to do with population. It’s all about money and short term gain. If you’ve ever been to UMass Amherst, it’s in in the middle of the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, a fertile and lovely area of the country. There’s a series of strip malls there that were mostly farms not long ago. What is now a Home Depot was a hothouse that grew flowers all year long. That land fell in value because the US government invested billions to turn California into a farmers market for the world. That land is an asphalt parking lot because tax policy makes it easy for big box stores to be built for little or no investment. For example, Dollar General stores get thrown up for about $300k and the company invests something like $30k, that’s it. That’s why you can be in a place like Georgia or South Carolina in the harvest season and walk out the door with peaches from 3,000 miles away.
- devoply 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion > A major environmental concern known as topsoil erosion occurs when the topsoil layer is blown or washed away. Without topsoil, little plant life is possible. The estimated annual costs of public and environmental health losses related to soil erosion exceed $45 billion. Conventional agriculture encourages the depletion of topsoil because the soil must be plowed and replanted each year. Sustainable techniques attempt to slow erosion through the use of cover crops in order to build organic matter in the soil. The United States alone loses almost 3 tons of topsoil per acre per year.[10] This is of great ecological concern as one inch of topsoil can take between 500 and 1,000 years to form naturally. > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. So yeah go ahead feed the overpopulation of the hungry, hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. In 60 years this is going to be another global warming situation that we have known about but yet let continue until we could no longer do so.
  - fao_ 7y ago
    > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. Playing devil's advocate, there's no guarantee that these trends will continue. For a related example of this go and look up the Malthusian catastrophe
    - devoply 7y ago
      I am going to live forever, so far I am doing fine... See most life extinct on planet... like 99%.
  - schiffern 7y ago
    >hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. And if it turns out the cheapest and best "tech" is soil conservation, what then? "Tech" tends to mean high-tech, but high-tech is also high cost (see vertical farming). It's quite possible that low tech / appropriate tech solutions will win in the end. Also, how many decades of R&D delay for this (rather... ambitious) Replace All The Plants Project are you asking for? The whole 60 years? Or should we tap the brakes (ie implement known soil conservation techniques) before going off the cliff?
- fao_ 7y ago
  > Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining. This is demonstratably false, you only have to look at Hydroponics to see that. A lot of plants are difficult to grow via Hydroponics, and Hydroponicists go to a lot of trouble to put nutrients in the water that they use, despite the fact that _not_ doing so would allow the Hydroponics system to be more efficient and need less maintenance (the latter of which is the main barrier to general-use Hydroponics). If one looks at spray-based systems, the main cost there is the nutrients clogging the spray heads. However, without those nutrients, the plant will literally not grow. The microorganisms, metals, and NPK in the soil are hugely important to the growth and nutrition of the resulting product.
  - quixoticelixer- 7y ago
    That's not what he is saying, he is saying that most of the biomass is from hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, which it is.
    - stevenhuang 7y ago
      Which is true but not too relevant, as he explains the limiting factor is not that the biomass is mostly hydrogen/oxygen/carbon, it is the lack of nutrients. And as cited elsewhere, see Liebig's law of the minimum.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum
PopeDotNinja 7y ago
Recently I learned how much we depend on phosphate mining to provide nutrients for farming, and I found it unsettling how uncommon phosphate deposits are. Here's an entertaining sub-4 minute watch on the topic of how a majority of phosphate deposits are located in Morocco -- https://youtu.be/O0BooiAxQyY https://youtu.be/O0BooiAxQyY. I just looked up how much different countries produce, and had assumed most phosphates would be coming out of Morocco. My guess was incorrect. It appears that Morocco produces ~13% of the world supply, but has ~72% of deposits. For constrast, the USA produces ~12% annually with ~2% of world deposits, and China produces ~45% annually with ~5% of all deposits. If I were the leader of a country with lots o' people, I'd be cozing up to Morocco a whole bunch. [1] Knowing nothing about mining anything darn thing, I now wonder how interesting the work is in finding & mining new sources sources of phosphates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate#Occurrence_and_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate#Occurrence_and_minin...
- devoply 7y ago
  I am sure they are due for a regime change for oppressing their people at some point in the future.
- emj 7y ago
  It's a bit worrying that they talk about burning human shit to get phosphate when you can just compost it.
  - seunosewa 7y ago
    I guess it's because composting doesn't guarantee the destruction of pathogens.
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Yeah human waste fertilizer sounds like a very good way to get outbreaks.
  - robocat 7y ago
    The issue is probably all the contaminants in human poo, especially medical: anti-bacterials, hormones, radioactive tracers. Maybe it isn't so much purifying the phosphate that matters, but removing components that would be bad to recirculate into our food chain.
pfdietz 7y ago
Both nitrogen and potassium are available in unlimited supply (and hydrogen from non-fossil sources can be used instead of hydrogen from natural gas). It's the phosphate, and possibly N2O emission, that constrain things. Eventually phosphate may have to be mined from average crust rocks, where it occurs at about 1000 ppm.
- helkafen 7y ago
  We can also be good citizens of the Earth and recycle the phosphorus we extract.
dghughes 7y ago
Crop rotation was a huge advancement in agriculture. It assists in soil nutrient replenishment. Additional minerals and synthetic nitrogen can be added if needed.
mhkool 7y ago
Plants need at least 42 minerals and soil in every location of the planet has those minerals, mostly in insoluable (non plant available) form. Aerobic bacteries and funghi have enzymes that extract those minerals and they are mostly kept in their bodies. Amoebas and worms of all sizes eat bacteries and funghi which releases a large amount of minerals in water soluable form in their poop and coincidently the poop is nearby the roots of plants. Some plants are called "nitrogen fixers" since they have clumbs of bacteries on their roots that convert N2 into plant available forms of nitrogen. Plowed soil is fluffy after plowing and compacted after a few weeks since the plowed soil has no structure. What can we learn from these facts? * do everything possible to keep the life in the soil alive: do not use pesticides, funghicides or herbicides since the toxins are not specific and kill all soil life. * aerate the soil to have enough oxygen (O2) and nitrate (N2) in the soil. Use a broadfork, but only with compacted soil. * do not plow since that breaks the networks of funghi and ultimately deteriorates the performance of plants. Want to know more? See the video "Restoring Soil Biology, Increasing Yields and Reducing Costs" by Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk14Qyulc9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk14Qyulc9E
- pygy_ 7y ago
  > do everything possible to keep the life in the soil alive: do not use pesticides, funghicides or herbicides since the toxins are not specific and kill all soil life. It should be noted that glyphosate has antimicrobial and fungicidal properties. Also, plants can turn the bedrock into dirt, either directly, or through their mycorrhyzal and rhyzosphere bacteria. Trees are especially useful to extract nutrient from rocks. That being said, I think that Merril has a point. we're accelerating the extraction process (by dumping our waste products in rivers, rather than peeing/pooping where plants grow), and I have no idea how long we'll get away with these practices. Human effluvia is full of drugs, and thus unfit for agriculture anyways...
  - pstuart 7y ago
    > Human effluvia is full of drugs, and thus unfit for agriculture anyways... For direct application, yes. But it could feed a pipeline where, say, the 3 generation of those nutrients could be harvested and applied to food crops.
fao_ 7y ago
Off Topic: I argued a similar point a while back (albeit I think I mixed up phosphorous and nitrogen) on Hacker News and got downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20139102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20139102 It's interesting how fickle hacker news can be.
maxerickson 7y ago
You can fix nitrogen with an electric arc. Using natural gas is way cheaper of course. But cheap enough electricity means you can have nitrogen fertilizer (and nuclear for example, fraught as it might be, is cheap enough).
learnfromstory 7y ago
Most of California agriculture is engaged in extracting fossil fertility that came from the ocean. Salmon runs -> bear poop -> soil for thousands of years. We killed all the bears and all the fish so this cycle is now unidirectional.
dharma1 7y ago
What does it take to change the way things are done? It feels like no tech startup is going to solve this in 5 years - more like a cultural shift that can take generations
aaron_m04 7y ago
> [...] eaten and the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other minerals are flushed into the rivers and oceans. What if we didn't though? Sewage could be turned into fertilizer, though probably not safely for growing food crops no matter how we treat it. Still, there must be some other way of putting the nutrients back in the local environment.
Albertchrist 7y ago
Yes for that we need to limit chemical usage and try to focus on organic farming. Only them we can restore all the necessary elements in soil again.
growlist 7y ago
The UK has an extensive potash mine. Quite an amazing site - it extends out under the North Sea in places and has a laboratory doing various interesting science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine But what struck me about it was the seemingly pretty scary thought that we are apparently dependent on non-renewable sources like this to stay alive, and everyone continues life like it's a sensible way to proceed. What happens if/when supplies are interrupted? Or the mineral is mined out?

windsurfer 7y ago

Over 95% of a plant is just hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon that it pulled from the air or water. Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago
I disagree. Farming is surface mining. Maybe aquaponics and hydroponics are only reliant on water and nutrients. And we should probably switch to soilless farming more..but soil based farming is most certainly surface mining and the most destructive thing we can do to this planet.
- gleapsite 7y ago
  Certainly prevalent forms of argiculture are akin to surface mining. My property is surrounded on three sides by a rotated field (corn, wheat, soy etc) and there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. However I believe there are forms of soil agriculture that aren't surface mining such as a short rotation coppice. The primary molecular structures being extracted are lignin and cellulose, which are comprised of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (that is, water and air sources).
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    I agree. But industrial fossil fuel based global Ag is brutal on the soil..top soil once gone will take years and years to form..if at all it does ..
  - schiffern 7y ago
    >there's a 12-18" drop along those edges of my property line, persumably as the soil was extracted in plant form. This presumption is incorrect. Do the math: 99+% of that mass loss is because of wind and water erosion, not plant growth.
    - lovich 7y ago
      Would his property not also experience the same erosion? I could see irrigation from the farming causing extra water erosion but wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste?
      - schiffern 7y ago
        The acceleration of erosion on farms is mainly caused by tillage (plowing), the building of fast farm drainage networks (vs infiltrating water to recharge aquifers), lack of trees to block surface-level winds (vs winrows), and heavy biocide application which kills the plant roots/fungal hyphae/bacterial aggregates that hold soil together. >wouldn't that ultimately be the same as when mining operations remove whatever minerals they consider waste? No because soil isn't waste, it's a valuable material.
      - RhodesianHunter 7y ago
        No, because presumably his property has permanent plants with roots that retain the soil, while his neighbors are constantly tilling the land making it easily blown or washed away.
        lovich 7y ago
        I don't see how this isn't analogous to mining still. Coal mines clear cut mountains. A smaller portion of the mountain in the form of coal is kept and shipped. The other materials of the mountain are blown away as a side affect of the clear cutting operation. Farmers harvest crops from their land. A smaller portion of the land in the form of crops is kept and shipped. The other materials of the land are blown away as a side affect of the farming operation. Why are these functionality different other than one operation wants a mineral in the ground and one operation wants freshly harvested plants?
- 11235813213455 7y ago
  Permaculture is not, it's actually enriching the soil (in terms of living organisms) and the local ecosystem, it's a sustainable farming method gaining popularity with the decreasing productivity of common intensives monocultures
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    I agree. But yield is much less. Especially considering land mass for Ag is shrinking and we will likely face an uncertain future because of climate change. Indoor Ag can be controlled. I use permaculture and biodynamic methods for orchards and perennials but annual row crops, tillage methods seem to be the best option so far. I am a fan of permaculture but I don’t know if it’s feasible everywhere and for all kinds of crops.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  No. That’s an incredibly ignorant statement that is unfortunately commonly believed by many people these days. We currently subsidize a type of agriculture that is very extractive. But farming isn’t inherently that way, and has only been that way for a few decades. I’ve seen the right way — working on a midsize farm that was producing a variety of crops and dairy from the late 1600s until around 2006. Techniques like crop diversification, rotation, low-tillage, etc it is very feasible to create a sustainable agricultural environment. Think about the tragedy of all of the incredibly fertile and water-rich land that fed NYC in New Jersey that is now subdivisions. Now “environmentally concerned” people are drinking half gallons of crushed almonds, sugar and water grown in arid areas with threatened water supplies. It does mean that you need to roll back the direct and indirect subsidy that creates exploitive markets. That means you don’t grow lettuce in the California desert. It also means seasonal vegetables and smaller scale farms.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    well.. world population in 1600 = 500 million current world population = 7.5ish billion expected population 2050 = 10 billion subsidies wont make a huge dent. population reduction might. ..but that would take 150-200 years if everyone stopped procreating after half a surviving child.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      None of this has anything to do with population. It’s all about money and short term gain. If you’ve ever been to UMass Amherst, it’s in in the middle of the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, a fertile and lovely area of the country. There’s a series of strip malls there that were mostly farms not long ago. What is now a Home Depot was a hothouse that grew flowers all year long. That land fell in value because the US government invested billions to turn California into a farmers market for the world. That land is an asphalt parking lot because tax policy makes it easy for big box stores to be built for little or no investment. For example, Dollar General stores get thrown up for about $300k and the company invests something like $30k, that’s it. That’s why you can be in a place like Georgia or South Carolina in the harvest season and walk out the door with peaches from 3,000 miles away.
devoply 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsoil#Erosion > A major environmental concern known as topsoil erosion occurs when the topsoil layer is blown or washed away. Without topsoil, little plant life is possible. The estimated annual costs of public and environmental health losses related to soil erosion exceed $45 billion. Conventional agriculture encourages the depletion of topsoil because the soil must be plowed and replanted each year. Sustainable techniques attempt to slow erosion through the use of cover crops in order to build organic matter in the soil. The United States alone loses almost 3 tons of topsoil per acre per year.[10] This is of great ecological concern as one inch of topsoil can take between 500 and 1,000 years to form naturally. > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. So yeah go ahead feed the overpopulation of the hungry, hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. In 60 years this is going to be another global warming situation that we have known about but yet let continue until we could no longer do so.
- fao_ 7y ago
  > Based on 2014 trends, the world has about 60 years of topsoil left. Playing devil's advocate, there's no guarantee that these trends will continue. For a related example of this go and look up the Malthusian catastrophe
  - devoply 7y ago
    I am going to live forever, so far I am doing fine... See most life extinct on planet... like 99%.
- schiffern 7y ago
  >hopefully in 60 years there is tech to replace all the plants that can no longer be grown. And if it turns out the cheapest and best "tech" is soil conservation, what then? "Tech" tends to mean high-tech, but high-tech is also high cost (see vertical farming). It's quite possible that low tech / appropriate tech solutions will win in the end. Also, how many decades of R&D delay for this (rather... ambitious) Replace All The Plants Project are you asking for? The whole 60 years? Or should we tap the brakes (ie implement known soil conservation techniques) before going off the cliff?
fao_ 7y ago
> Only a very small percentage of the material in a plant is actually from the soil, so most of the activity on a farm is not fundamentally a form of mining. This is demonstratably false, you only have to look at Hydroponics to see that. A lot of plants are difficult to grow via Hydroponics, and Hydroponicists go to a lot of trouble to put nutrients in the water that they use, despite the fact that _not_ doing so would allow the Hydroponics system to be more efficient and need less maintenance (the latter of which is the main barrier to general-use Hydroponics). If one looks at spray-based systems, the main cost there is the nutrients clogging the spray heads. However, without those nutrients, the plant will literally not grow. The microorganisms, metals, and NPK in the soil are hugely important to the growth and nutrition of the resulting product.
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
  That's not what he is saying, he is saying that most of the biomass is from hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, which it is.
  - stevenhuang 7y ago
    Which is true but not too relevant, as he explains the limiting factor is not that the biomass is mostly hydrogen/oxygen/carbon, it is the lack of nutrients. And as cited elsewhere, see Liebig's law of the minimum.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Liebig's law of the minimum Liebig law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1828) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebig's_law_of_the_minimum

PopeDotNinja 7y ago

Recently I learned how much we depend on phosphate mining to provide nutrients for farming, and I found it unsettling how uncommon phosphate deposits are. Here's an entertaining sub-4 minute watch on the topic of how a majority of phosphate deposits are located in Morocco -- https://youtu.be/O0BooiAxQyY https://youtu.be/O0BooiAxQyY. I just looked up how much different countries produce, and had assumed most phosphates would be coming out of Morocco. My guess was incorrect. It appears that Morocco produces ~13% of the world supply, but has ~72% of deposits. For constrast, the USA produces ~12% annually with ~2% of world deposits, and China produces ~45% annually with ~5% of all deposits. If I were the leader of a country with lots o' people, I'd be cozing up to Morocco a whole bunch. [1] Knowing nothing about mining anything darn thing, I now wonder how interesting the work is in finding & mining new sources sources of phosphates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate#Occurrence_and_mining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphate#Occurrence_and_minin...

devoply 7y ago
I am sure they are due for a regime change for oppressing their people at some point in the future.
emj 7y ago
It's a bit worrying that they talk about burning human shit to get phosphate when you can just compost it.
- seunosewa 7y ago
  I guess it's because composting doesn't guarantee the destruction of pathogens.
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Yeah human waste fertilizer sounds like a very good way to get outbreaks.
- robocat 7y ago
  The issue is probably all the contaminants in human poo, especially medical: anti-bacterials, hormones, radioactive tracers. Maybe it isn't so much purifying the phosphate that matters, but removing components that would be bad to recirculate into our food chain.

pfdietz 7y ago

Both nitrogen and potassium are available in unlimited supply (and hydrogen from non-fossil sources can be used instead of hydrogen from natural gas). It's the phosphate, and possibly N2O emission, that constrain things. Eventually phosphate may have to be mined from average crust rocks, where it occurs at about 1000 ppm.

helkafen 7y ago
We can also be good citizens of the Earth and recycle the phosphorus we extract.

dghughes 7y ago

Crop rotation was a huge advancement in agriculture. It assists in soil nutrient replenishment. Additional minerals and synthetic nitrogen can be added if needed.

mhkool 7y ago

Plants need at least 42 minerals and soil in every location of the planet has those minerals, mostly in insoluable (non plant available) form. Aerobic bacteries and funghi have enzymes that extract those minerals and they are mostly kept in their bodies. Amoebas and worms of all sizes eat bacteries and funghi which releases a large amount of minerals in water soluable form in their poop and coincidently the poop is nearby the roots of plants. Some plants are called "nitrogen fixers" since they have clumbs of bacteries on their roots that convert N2 into plant available forms of nitrogen. Plowed soil is fluffy after plowing and compacted after a few weeks since the plowed soil has no structure. What can we learn from these facts? * do everything possible to keep the life in the soil alive: do not use pesticides, funghicides or herbicides since the toxins are not specific and kill all soil life. * aerate the soil to have enough oxygen (O2) and nitrate (N2) in the soil. Use a broadfork, but only with compacted soil. * do not plow since that breaks the networks of funghi and ultimately deteriorates the performance of plants. Want to know more? See the video "Restoring Soil Biology, Increasing Yields and Reducing Costs" by Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk14Qyulc9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk14Qyulc9E

pygy_ 7y ago
> do everything possible to keep the life in the soil alive: do not use pesticides, funghicides or herbicides since the toxins are not specific and kill all soil life. It should be noted that glyphosate has antimicrobial and fungicidal properties. Also, plants can turn the bedrock into dirt, either directly, or through their mycorrhyzal and rhyzosphere bacteria. Trees are especially useful to extract nutrient from rocks. That being said, I think that Merril has a point. we're accelerating the extraction process (by dumping our waste products in rivers, rather than peeing/pooping where plants grow), and I have no idea how long we'll get away with these practices. Human effluvia is full of drugs, and thus unfit for agriculture anyways...
- pstuart 7y ago
  > Human effluvia is full of drugs, and thus unfit for agriculture anyways... For direct application, yes. But it could feed a pipeline where, say, the 3 generation of those nutrients could be harvested and applied to food crops.

fao_ 7y ago

Off Topic: I argued a similar point a while back (albeit I think I mixed up phosphorous and nitrogen) on Hacker News and got downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20139102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20139102 It's interesting how fickle hacker news can be.

maxerickson 7y ago

You can fix nitrogen with an electric arc. Using natural gas is way cheaper of course. But cheap enough electricity means you can have nitrogen fertilizer (and nuclear for example, fraught as it might be, is cheap enough).

learnfromstory 7y ago

Most of California agriculture is engaged in extracting fossil fertility that came from the ocean. Salmon runs -> bear poop -> soil for thousands of years. We killed all the bears and all the fish so this cycle is now unidirectional.

dharma1 7y ago

What does it take to change the way things are done? It feels like no tech startup is going to solve this in 5 years - more like a cultural shift that can take generations

aaron_m04 7y ago

> [...] eaten and the nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and other minerals are flushed into the rivers and oceans. What if we didn't though? Sewage could be turned into fertilizer, though probably not safely for growing food crops no matter how we treat it. Still, there must be some other way of putting the nutrients back in the local environment.

Albertchrist 7y ago

Yes for that we need to limit chemical usage and try to focus on organic farming. Only them we can restore all the necessary elements in soil again.

growlist 7y ago

The UK has an extensive potash mine. Quite an amazing site - it extends out under the North Sea in places and has a laboratory doing various interesting science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulby_Mine But what struck me about it was the seemingly pretty scary thought that we are apparently dependent on non-renewable sources like this to stay alive, and everyone continues life like it's a sensible way to proceed. What happens if/when supplies are interrupted? Or the mineral is mined out?