Organic Agriculture and Feeding the World
A question for those who are thinking organic farming is the only way to go.
In light of the farmer protests in Europe and the disaster in Sri Lanka, I am perplexed by all the calls to immediately shift all agricultural production to organics.
As a life-long agriculture guy, I have a question that hounds me when I’m seeing the breadth and the intensity of this movement. There are a lot of people who know more about organic farming and environmental science than I. I have no delusion about that, and I personally know some of these very knowledgeable people. They have expertise in their field and are passionate about their work. I would never disparage their opinions.
I would like to propose a single question for your consideration regarding feeding the world with only organic farming. Raised on a farm and having spent most of my life working in agriculture, I too am passionate about my life’s work. It is true that I’ve spent most of my professional life in the fertilizer industry, which will be a red flag to anyone reading this looking for evidence that I am a shill for the industry. I hope that as you consider the question I pose that you will not dismiss it out of hand, but will think about the implications - if it has merit. As one who spent 20+ years doing technical presentations on crop nutrition and soil science, I hope I’m not bragging when asserting that I may have a little knowledge of the subject.
Related: Food Security and Mandated Fertilizer Restrictions
Question: How will we get enough plant food into our crops to produce enough food to feed the world?
Agriculture is so varied and complex that perhaps as we consider this question, for the sake of simplicity we only think about the staple foods of the world: wheat and corn. How will we produce enough grain to feed 8 billion people without manufactured fertilizer?
This is the definition of organic fertilizer that I found on the internet:
An organic fertilizer is a fertilizer that is derived from organic sources, including organic compost, cattle manures, poultry droppings and domestic sewage.
Sadly, many of the same folks who advocate for organic farming are also agitating to eliminate beef from our diets. That would eliminate all manure from feedlots and dairies, major sources of manure for farming. Also, the push for cage free chickens and eggs takes away the sources for “poultry droppings”. Good luck collecting the chicken droppings from the pasture those fowls are ranging in freely!
That leaves organic compost and domestic sewage as possible sources of organic fertilizer. Even with feed lots, dairies and hen houses still in play, the sources of organic fertilizer are few and the volume from all of them combined is very small compared to the nutrient requirements of all the grain crops around the world.
Related: Importance of Ruminants to Food Security
The prediction of worldwide famine over a century ago and how mankind prevented it.
In the autumn of 1898, in Bristol, England, the new president of the British Academy of Sciences took the podium, and instead of a flowery speech about the accomplishments of the Academy for the year, he began a speech in which he predicted that if nothing was done, millions of people around the world would be starving, even in the most developed nations, by 1930. The very best British scientists sat in silence as Sir William Crookes explained how the world was in peril. As scientific advancements in sanitation, medicine, and industrialization of commerce made it possible for more people to survive and thrive, the population of the world was growing. And according to Crookes’ calculations, the food supply would be maxed out and mass starvation would prevail.
You see, food production through the 19th century was dependent upon manure of all types, including human, to maintain adequate yields to feed the population. The only reason the world had not run out of food before 1900 was because as soon as cropland became unproductive from depletion of nutrients, the farmer would move over and plow out some more virgin soil that was rich in nutrients. By the time of Crookes’ speech, a majority of the virgin soil in the world had been depleted of it’s natural fertility and there wasn’t enough manure to maintain crop yields. Plowing up grasslands and deforestation was happening at an alarming rate.
Crookes called on the scientific community of the world to find a way to harvest the vast reservoir of nitrogen that is contained in our atmosphere but is unavailable to plants and animals - inaccessible because it is inert. The trivalent bond of N2, inert nitrogen, that makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe, is the strongest chemical bond. In 1900 there was no way to break the trivalent bond and change the atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen plants can use (and as a result humans can benefit from as well). Plant-ready nitrogen is called fixed nitrogen. Legumes fix nitrogen naturally, and lightning has the power to break apart N2 and form small amounts of fixed nitrogen in our rainfall, but for the most part, all forms of nitrogen found in nature: manure, legumes, and lightning could barely sustain a world population of around 4 billion people.
That was the challenge. This was serious business. If the scientists could not solve the puzzle of breaking the N2 bond, the world was only a few short decades from devastation.
CHEMICAL FERTILIZER
I normally use the word synthetic fertilizer when discussing manufactured fertilizer. I laugh when people rant against chemical fertilizers because I know that ALL fertilizer is chemical. Seriously, I’m not playing games. Ammonium and nitrate, which are plant ready forms of nitrogen, are found in manure, in organic mater in the soil, and in manufactured fertilizer. If you take an ion of nitrate from cow manure and an ion of nitrate from manufactured nitrate fertilizer, both ions are chemically identical. The most advanced scientist in the universe could not tell you which ion came from the dung and which came from the atmosphere (which is the source of all manufactured nitrogen fertilizer). I like to playfully call it ATMOSPHERIC NITROGEN because the atmosphere is its source. (Even my green friends like to eat food grown with ATMOSPHERIC NITROGEN!)
HOW THE WORLD WAS SAVED FROM STARVATION
I will let author Thomas Hagar explain. He has written the fascinating true history of the Habor-Bosch system of fixing nitrogen in his book: Alchemy of Air (link).
Author Thomas Hagar:
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were two chemists who invented a way to turn air into bread . . . Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life and death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, their discovery is keeping alive nearly half the people on earth.
Most people do not know the names of either the men or their invention. But we should thank them every time we take a bite of food. Their work lives today in the form of giant factories, usually located in remote areas, that drink rivers of water, inhale oceans of air, and burn about 2 percent of all the earth’s energy. If all the machines these men invented were shut down today, more than two billion people would starve to death.
Thank goodness for Haber-Bosch! Childhood mortality rate is the lowest ever. In the developed West we have had the safest, most abundant food supply in human history. Lately we’ve been complaining about grocery store shelves being 20% empty. Well cry me a river! Just ask our Dust Bowl Era ancestors if they would trade places with us!
“ORGANIC” CHEMICAL FERTILIZER
As I mentioned above “organic” fertilizer has the same chemical composition as manufactured fertilizer. There are a few drawbacks to organic fertilizer and some positives as well.
DRAWBACKS
1. Less nutrient density. Very low nutrients per pound of material. It takes tons of animal manure per acre to equal 300 lbs of commercial fertilizer, which means the gathering, spreading and incorporating of the organic stuff is extra cumbersome and adds cost. It requires more trips to the field from the source.
2. Disease outbreaks. Some of the most memorable E-coli outbreaks resulting in spinach and lettuce recalls have resulted from cross contamination of food handling equipment by vegetables fertilized with E-Coli contaminated animal feces.
3. Lower crop yield per acre, typically. That is why “organic” fruits and vegetables cost more. Production is less efficient. Which leads to #4.
4. Lower crop yields means you need more land on which to grow the crops to feed the world, and there is not enough suitable cropland to feed the world at the yield levels achieved by organic farming. Never mind that there isn’t anywhere near the amount of organic fertilizer available to cover those acres.
Please don’t get me wrong. If you know the drawbacks to organic foods and still want them I will stand with you to have the right to have them. But if activists are successful in ridding the world of manufactured fertilizer, we are in a world of hurt.
Atmospheric nitrogen made into little white pellets to fertilize the world’s crops is the greatest godsend our planet has ever received (besides Easter). We should rejoice in the abundance of food that we have - enough to feed every citizen of the world if we all work together.
The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed The World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, Thomas Hager. 336 pages. Crown Publishing, 2009.
Manure/compost and feeding the world
I definitely don’t want to leave the impression that manure is not an essential part of food production whether you are a large farmer or a home gardener.
ADVANTAGES OF ORGANIC FERTILIZER.
If it’s nearby and cheap, it is a good use of natural waste products. (Just don’t use it on spinach or lettuce, please).
If land isn’t scarce in your area, you may be able to make more per acre marketing your organic crops at a local market. Everyone should have the freedom to pursue their livelihood.
MANURE/COMPOST ENHANCES CROP PRODUCTION
Manure makes many important contributions to agriculture and has for thousands of years. It is very important that people who want to remove meat from the human diet (link) remember: when you remove animals from our diet, you also remove manure which is used for producing food.
Benefits of manure:
Manure is an excellent source of organic matter the USDA defines organic matter here(link):
Soil organic matter (SOM) is the organic component of soil, consisting of three primary parts including small (fresh) plant residues and small living soil organisms, decomposing (active) organic matter, and stable organic matter (humus).
When manure is incorporated into the soil, it contributes these valuable components to the soil ecosystem. Many people think of dirt as a dead medium that plants grow in, but in fact, soil is alive with tiny organisms and bacteria that are hard at work converting dead plant tissues and minerals into available sources of nutrients for plants. For example, plants cannot utilize elemental sulfur. But there is a little microbe that converts elemental sulfur into sulfuric acid! That little guy must be some tough critter! The acid quickly converts to sulfate that plants can use. Bigger organisms like earthworms and ants help improve the soil structure so air can get to the roots of plants. Manure increases all types of biological diversity in the soil.
Manure/compost also improves soil structure by improving the soil tilth (or fluffiness). Soil with abundant organic matter is more permeable which allows air to reach the roots and rainwater to soak in without running off thereby minimizing soil erosion.
Nutrients. Even though the nutrient density of manure is low compared to commercial fertilizer, it still contains primary and secondary plant nutrients as well as micronutrients.
It also improves the water and nutrient holding capacity of the soil which helps prevent nutrients from leaching out of the root zone and reduces irrigation requirements.
Cost can be low if you are near an abundant source of manure or compost.
As you can see, the advantages of manure are many.
Waste Not, Want Not
It would be good if all the animal manure in the world was utilized to improve production of crops and gardens. If you are using manure in your garden, be sure to incorporate it in the soil to prevent it from washing into ponds, streams, or lakes where it can cause ecological problems.
Also, if you have a compost pile, you might toss a handful of nitrogen fertilizer into the pile occasionally. The microbes breaking that compost down would probably love an extra shot of nitrogen. Nitrogen can be a limiting factor to how quickly your compost is broken down and ready for use. (Avoid putting salty table scraps into your compost pile. Sodium from the table salt is not good for the soil).
I know nothing about farming, but I thought organic farming had to do with fertilizer and pesticides. As a consumer, I am more concerned about pesticides on my foods, particularly fruit, than I am about what kind of fertilizer was used.
What do you think of Joel Salatin's ideas:
Joe Rogan Experience #1478 – Joel Salatin:
https://www.jrepodcast.com/episode/joe-rogan-experience-1478-joel-salatin/
https://polyfacefarms.com/
Note BBC's big Fear Porn documentary on Livestock farming, they interviewed Joel Salatin but curiously left out the interview entirely on their documentary, but had a few seconds of him on their trailer:
Meat: A Threat to Our Planet:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11466036/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0