We should reduce the use of chemical fertilizers and make the chemical industry pay for nitrogen pollution, instead of criminalizing farmers trapped in a chemical treadmill by the industrial agriculture model.

The manufacture of synthetic fertilizers is highly energy-intensive. One kg of nitrogen fertilizer requires the energy equivalent of 2 liters of diesel.

Energy used during fertilizer manufacture is equivalent to 191 billion liters of diesel in 2000 and is projected to rise to 277 billion in 2030.

This is a major contributor to climate change, yet is largely ignored. One kilogram of phosphate fertilizer requires half a liter of diesel.

Nitrogen fertilizers also emit a greenhouse gas, N2O, which is 300 times more destabilizing for the climate system than CO2.

The linear extractive agriculture system based on fossil fuels is rupturing ecological processes and planetary boundaries. The planetary boundaries that have been transgressed to a high-risk zone are biodiversity and nitrogen pollution from chemical fertilizers.

The most severe violations of planetary boundaries are due to fossil fuel, chemical-intensive industrial globalized agriculture, the disruption of biodiversity integrity and genetic diversity leading to biodiversity loss and species extinction, and the biochemical nitrogen and phosphorus cycles caused by large-scale monocultures and large-scale use of chemical pesticides.

Erosion of genetic diversity and the transgression of the nitrogen boundary have already crossed catastrophic levels. These overshoots are rooted in the chemical-intensive, fossil fuel-intensive industrial model of agriculture. Ninety-three percent of cultivated crops have disappeared.

The scientific and just response to the nitrogen problem is to shift from fossil fuel chemical agriculture to biodiverse ecological agriculture and regenerative farming and to create transition strategies for farmers to shift to ecological agriculture, which regenerates soil nitrogen while making farmers free of harmful and costly chemicals.

Chemical-free food is good for the health of the planet and people.

The unscientific, unjust and undemocratic response to the chemical industry-created nitrogen problem is to reduce farmers instead of reducing dependence on chemical fertilizers as is happening in the Netherlands.

To reduce chemical fertilizer use, governments need to make the fertilizer industry pay for nitrogen pollution, and redirect subsidies from industrial agriculture to ecological farming. Criminalizing farmers for the crimes of the chemical industry is unfair and unjust.

We need more farmers, not less, to regenerate the earth through an economy of care and belonging, and to produce real food which regenerates the health of the planet and our health.

There is a dystopian vision of a future of “Farming with Farmers,” digital agriculture with larger farms, more fertilizer use, more biodiversity loss.

While creating “Farming without Farmers” billionaires like Bill Gates are promoting more synthetic fertilizer use, aggravating the nitrogen problem.

Gates is promoting nitrogen fertilizers and chemical-intensive GMO soya as raw material for lab-made fake food that is being labeled as “plant-based.”

The billionaire’s recipe is to have larger chemical-intensive monoculture artificially fertilized by synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which will emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas.

In total denial of climate science and soil ecology, Gates is continuing the “chemical hocus pocus” when he says we need to use more fertilizer.

“To grow crops, you want tons of nitrogen — way more than you would ever find in a natural setting. Adding nitrogen is how you get corn to grow 19 feet tall and produce enormous quantities of seed.”

This statement is scientifically and ecologically false.

Soil is a living system. There are multiple pathways to regenerate the soil and soil nitrogen and heal the nitrogen cycle.

The living soil was forgotten for an entire century with very high costs to nature and society. Soil was defined as an “empty container” for pouring synthetic fertilizers into, which were falsely seen as the source of soil fertility.

“Bread from air” was the slogan after the discovery of the Haber Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen by burning fossil fuels. The illusion grew that we did not need soil.

There was the exaggerated claim that artificial fertilizers would increase food production and remove all ecological limits that land puts on agriculture.

Today the evidence is growing that artificial fertilizers have reduced soil fertility and food production and contributed to desertification, water scarcity and climate change. They have created dead zones in the oceans.

The process used to make explosives by burning fossil fuels at high temperatures to fix atmospheric nitrogen was later used to make chemical fertilizers.

Justus von Liebig was the father of organic chemistry, the first scientist to explain the role of nitrogen in plants, which was quickly appropriated by greed for commerce. A new industry was created for external inputs of nitrogen, dubbed “growth stimulants.”

Outraged at the distortion of his scientific findings, in 1861 he wrote a book, “The Search for Agricultural Recycling.”

Liebig’s book was the voice of a true scientist, protecting his truth from distortions of a pseudo-science being created by commercial interests. He writes:

“I thought it would be enough to just announce and spread the truth as is customary in science. I finally came to understand that this wasn’t right, and the altars of lies must be destroyed if we wish to give truth a fair chance.”

The truth that Liebig was defending was that the soil is living, and its life depends on recycling, or what Sir Albert Howard later called “The Law of Return” in his “An Agricultural Testament” nearly half a century later.

The lie he wanted to destroy was what he called the “chemical hocus pocus,” that you can keep extracting nutrients from the soil, giving nothing back, and have “high yields.”

Selling more fertilizers is good for the profits of the chemical industry, but it is not good for the soil or the climate. It violates nature’s law of return. And it denies farmers the ecological alternatives to regenerate and renew soil nitrogen.

Farmers did not create the nitrogen problem. The problem is created by the chemical industry. According to the polluter pays principle, the chemical industry must pay for the pollution. Farmers are consumers of fertilizers, not the manufacturers.

They are victims of a chemical-intensive industrial agriculture system, like the biodiversity of plants, and animals and the consumers whose health is degenerating with industrial food style chronic diseases. The planet and people need more farmers, not less.

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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pollution-synthetic-nitrogen-fertilizer/