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Max G Levy
The disruption of Earth’s chemical cycles brings problems. But planet-warming carbon dioxide isn’t the only detail whose cycle has become wobbly: we also have a phosphorus problem. And that’s a big problem, because we have that detail to grow global cultures. “I don’t know if it would be imaginable to have a whole world without phosphorus mineral fertilizers,” says Joséphine Demay, a PhD student at INRAE, the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.
Since the 1800s, farmers have known that elemental phosphorus is a must-have fertilizer. Nations soon began to exploit reserves of “phosphate rock,” minerals rich in elements. By the mid-twentieth century, corporations had industrialized chemical processes into a form suitable for overfeeding crops, hardening them against disease and making them capable of supporting more people and livestock. This technique worked remarkably well: the post-World War II “Green Revolution” fed countless people fertilizers and pesticides. Too many smart things.
We have released Earth’s phosphorus caches so temporarily that the detail is now polluting freshwater ecosystems, where the excess causes destructive algal blooms, infiltrates snowpack, and reduces levels of dissolved oxygen in lakes and rivers. Studies suggest that humanity relies too heavily on it for food. The planet, and we lack this non-renewable resource, which comes from geological deposits that take millennia to form. When washed from the ground in waterways, it necessarily disappears forever. An imminent “maximum phosphorus” moment threatens to drive up costs and foment political tensions if demand eclipses supply, as the vast majority of reserves exist only in one corner of North Africa.
In a paper published this month in Nature Geoscience, Demay broke down the amount of phosphorus used in 176 countries between the 1950s and 2017, and estimated how much mineral fertilizer use contributes to soil fertility in each country. 50% of global soil productivity. ” It’s never been quantified like that,” Demay says. And those numbers are important, he says, because “the paintings actually highlight the significant gap that exists between other regions of the world. “Rich countries in Western Europe, North America and Asia use much more global phosphate rock than Africa, African soils are relatively poor. “There’s a desire to distribute the first remaining rock reserves more equitably,” Demay says.
James Elser, an ecologist at Arizona State University and the University of Montana who studies the global phosphorus cycle, was surprised by the 50 percent figure: “That we could mobilize phosphorus from those ancient geological deposits and spread it around the world enough for some of the phosphorus in the soil now made up of commercial anthropogenic fertilizers is incredible. ” Says.
And if the remaining source decreases, costs will rise, exacerbating the access gap between rich and poor countries, says Dana Cordell, associate professor and director of studies on food formula sustainability at the University of Technology Sydney. In 2008, phosphate costs increased by 800% due to the source and call for problems, and back to 400% last year, due to Covid-related disruptions. The new study “shows how our global food formula now relies heavily on the extraction of non-renewable phosphate rock,” he says. And even if there is phosphate in the soil, it may not be economically viable to access it. “
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Scientists point to the “broken” cycle of phosphorus for more than a decade: humanity has unearthed huge amounts of this element, which ends up in the waterways back to farmland.
People and livestock eat crops and, as a result, excrete phosphorus. (A University of Iowa researcher calculated that the state’s cattle produce a load of feces equivalent to a country of 168 million people. )The waste remedy can turn sludge or manure into fertilizer, but transporting and processing it is impractical, so it can remain in stock and “dry batteries” without the opportunity to stimulate some other crop.
Or the formula can leak: sewage, septic tanks, reserves and eroded soil release phosphorus into oceans and rivers, where it is diluted to oblivion while degrading those ecological formulas. , starving thousands of manatees.
Demay’s style made us think that in 67 years, humans have pumped nearly a billion tons of non-renewable phosphorus into food systems. His team’s figures were drawn from the statistical knowledge of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Global knowledge, damaged across the country, shows agricultural yields, such as the amount of wheat grown or the number of pigs and cows, from 1961 to 2017. (Data from 1950 to 1961 come from other datasets. )
His team also broke down usage trends. In 2017, dependence on Western Europe, North America and Asia increased to nearly 60% of the total ready-to-use phosphorus found in each region’s soil. Brazil, China and India are expanding their use, to 61%, 74% and 67% respectively. The figures for France and the Netherlands are no longer expanding, as they have replaced some of the use of phosphate rock with manure; Now it’s about 70% and 50%. However, in African countries such as Zimbabwe, the lack of phosphorus in the soil limits crop yields. the average of 32 per cent for all of Africa.
For Elser, this highlights global inequality: poorer countries have access to far less fertilizer, even if they want it more. And rich countries have been able to build up rock reserves for decades, while countries suffering from food security cannot.
This raises considerations about who will take care of fertilizers in the long run. Almost 75% of the world’s source is found in the mines of Morocco and Western Sahara. the same fraction of the world’s oil, but with thirteen member states).
And it’s unclear precisely how long the materials will last. In 2009, Cordell estimated that a time of global “maximum phosphorus” could occur as early as 2030, leaving 50 to 100 years of reserves dwindling. Now, she and Elser agree that the peak will most likely come later, though it’s hard to wait when, as demand may skyrocket for other uses, such as lithium iron phosphate batteries. 400 years
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For Cordell, it’s frustrating that this chain of sources has been mismanaged. “and secure access,” he says. And if some other very important resource ran out, he said, “we would look for alternatives. “
He worries that phosphorus “is leaking through the cracks. “But, he says, it’s unclear who is to blame for overseeing its acquisition: which government or even which department. Agriculture?Environment?Health?Water? exchange?” It affects all those sectors,” he says.
Demay hopes their study will inspire more prudent agricultural practices: combining farmland and livestock spaces to more easily recycle phosphorus from manure, or planting trees or canopy crops, such as mustard or barley, that prevent off-season soil erosion from a farm, preserving waterways. of fertilizer contaminants. Better recycling systems can also help eliminate the world of phosphate rock. Currently, recycling basically consists of using manure or sludge from sanitation systems on farmland, basically to avoid water contaminants instead of fertilizing plants. such an inefficient and inefficient way,” says Cordell.
But other technologies are gaining popularity. Toilets that separate urine can remove phosphorus from liquids. Adding magnesium to wastewater can create “struvite” crystals, a select fertilizer. Another approach may be to simply make fertilizer granules from dry manure sludge after anaerobic digestion (which also generates biogas).
Biotechnology can simply decrease the need for fertilizer, Elser says, those concepts are still in their infancy. Theoretically, biologists can simply choose or modify crops to extract phosphorus more efficiently; Researchers already know the genes that stimulate phosphorus absorption. Lab-grown meat can reduce demand for livestock and the farmland that sustains them. And as an easier solution, eating less meat can do the same. “The less meat we have to grow in the form of cows or pigs, the less food we have to grow to feed them,” Elser says.
Elser is encouraged by the progress the world has made in its transition to renewable energy. He believes agriculture can also become more sustainable. With greater recycling of phosphorus in food formula, the world’s fertilizers can more easily flow to the places that need them. “At the end of the day, we’re going to have to adopt a better formula than we have. “Elser says. ” When this happens, I’m not sure. “
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