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I'm a vast gaping maw of ignorance here, but I thought we had solved nitrogen fixation with the fritz-Haber process at the cost of using fossil fuels. Am I wron

• murbard2 11y ago
  What I've been told is that, while fertilizers obviously help a lot, they aren't a panacea and the plant still needs to do some expensive nitrogen chemistry which will set limits to its growth, regardless of how much energy it gets from photosynthesis.
• Blahah 11y ago
  Supplementing nitrogen comes with a whole host of environmental trade-offs. In particular there are problems with pollution, where nitrogen added to fields gets washed off in the rain and ends up in waterways. There it can totally destabilise ecosystems by introducing a flood of nitrogen which is usually a scarce resource, leading to massive population explosions of some kinds of organisms, which in turn can leave huge buildups of toxic byproducts. This is called eutrophication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication