Where Yellow Means Go As Townsend explains to his students, «The ability to
make nitrogen fertilizer is one of the greatest boons in human history.»
The combination of high prices of natural gas, which is used to
make nitrogen fertilizer, and of phosphate, as reserves are depleted, suggests a much greater future emphasis on nutrient recycling — an area where small farmers producing for local markets have a distinct advantage over massive feeding operations.
Not exact matches
Industry, which includes factories that
make nitrogenous
fertilizers, take
nitrogen from the atmosphere and return it to the environment as nitrates.
At one point I heard them discuss how they could
make a bomb using garden
fertilizer for
nitrogen, cellulose and battery acid.
Developing and demonstrating practical methods of rebuilding natural soil fertility became J.I. Rodale's primary goal when World War II's sudden shortage of
nitrogen fertilizer — as it was diverted to
making munitions — exposed the natural nutrient poverty of the nation's soil.
Fritz Haber, for instance, could have died a hero for finding a way to
make fertilizer from the
nitrogen in air.
Few projects in plant biotechnology are harder, or promise a greater payoff, than enabling crops to
make their own
nitrogen fertilizer.
There's also interest in using metal catalysts to convert carbon dioxide into fuels,
make fertilizers from atmospheric
nitrogen and drive reactions in fuel - cell cars.
Biologically available
nitrogen for agricultural
fertilizer has been
made since 1906 using the Haber - Bosch process.
But in your research, you noticed that perennial grasses could be harvested repeatedly to
make hay, with hardly any added
fertilizer and without robbing the soil of essential nutrients like
nitrogen and phosphorus.
But here's the rub: Chemical companies turn
nitrogen found naturally in the atmosphere into ammonium and nitrate compounds that
make up
fertilizer.
Small amounts of the silvery grey metal are used to speed up or «catalyze» a number of key industrial processes, including those that
make drugs, detergents and
nitrogen fertilizer, and they even play a major role breaking down toxic pollutants in the catalytic converters of our cars.
In fact, had scientists not created synthetic, mostly natural - gas - based
fertilizer decades ago to improve nature's method of «fixing»
nitrogen — a process of breaking
nitrogen molecules apart to
make them available to plants — neither you nor I, nor most of the 7 billion people crowding the planet, would be here today.
Bowman intentionally
made mistakes on one test plot — «areas where we didn't apply enough
nitrogen fertilizer, where we simulated mistakes in the applicator, where we shut the boom off for a short period of time or plugged it up and ran for a while,» Bowman said.
The bacteria harvest H2 from their PHB store and use their nitrogenase to combine it with
nitrogen from the air to
make ammonia, the starting material for
fertilizer.
The organic food movement eschews the use of artificial
fertilizers, yet we can never forget a simple fact;
nitrogen fertilizers were
made possible by the Haber - Bosch process, a method literally of turning air into bread, which by some estimates kept a fifth of the world's population alive [4].
The next step, says Nocera, was to broaden the scope of their work by engineering another type of bacterium to take
nitrogen out of the air to
make fertilizer.
In the chemical toxin category, perchlorate (a naturally occurring chemical, but also a man -
made contaminant stemming from production of nitrate
fertilizer with certain types of ore serving as the
nitrogen source) and tobacco smoke (which contains hydrogen cyanide that can be converted into thiocyanate) are well - researched examples of chemical toxins that are considered goitrogenic because they can interfere with thyroid function.
The residuals may have use as a
fertilizer to help recycle
nitrogen instead of
making more
fertilizer to get to the oceans causing dead zones.
In Africa, work by the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) and others has shown that improving access to
nitrogen and phosphorus
fertilizers can
make a substantial difference in human well - being.
Developing and demonstrating practical methods of rebuilding natural soil fertility became J.I. Rodale's primary goal when World War II's sudden shortage of
nitrogen fertilizer — as it was diverted to
making munitions — exposed the natural nutrient poverty of the nation's soil.
95 The case for crop - based biofuels was further undermined when a team led by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize — winning chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, concluded that emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, from the synthetic
nitrogen fertilizer used to grow crops such as corn and rapeseed for biofuel production can negate any net reductions of CO2 emissions from replacing fossil fuels with biofuels, thus
making biofuels a threat to climate stability.
Skyrocketing
fertilizer costs
making up the bulk of recent increases in wheat production costs, and the cost of
fertilizers is largely tied to the cost of natural gas (production of
nitrogen - based
fertilizers consumes a considerable amount of natural gas).
While TreeHugger wishes that all of our food was organic and
made without
fertilizers, the fact is that much of North America's agriculture is dependent on
nitrogen fertilizer, and it is
made with natural gas.
Now we are demonstrating the generality of it by having another type of bacteria take
nitrogen out of the atmosphere to
make fertilizer.»