Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process. This can be replaced but is more expensive.
That said, it’s unclear to me if Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process, in which case it could be replaced by something renewable.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
Fertilizers are made from Amonia which in turn is made using the Haber-Bosch process which requires fossil fuels to provide the necessary energy and as reactants (see this related article).
There is also “natural” fertilizer made from organic mass left over from other activities which would otherwise go to waste, but that’s insufficient for large scale intensive farming (composting is fine for your community garden or even for supplementing low intensity agriculture, but not for the intensive industrial farming growing things like hybrid corn).
Finally, the use of techniques like crop rotation which lets letting fields lie fallow so that natural nitrate fixation occurs and the soil recovers do not make the soil rich enough in nitrates to support hybrid corn growing because, as I mentioned, the plant density is too high to be supported by natural soil alone without further addition of fertilizers.
That’s exactly what I said! Fertilizer is not made from oil. The factory is powered by oil. Just like your home where you garden is powered by oil.
Natural Gas - which is not renewable - is a reactant and Oil is still involved indirectly as a means to generate the power needed for the process. This can be replaced but is more expensive.
That said, it’s unclear to me if Oil is somehow used at the chemical plant to generate said energy (for example, to reach the necessary temperatures) or if it’s even more indirect than that and it’s just fuelling Power Generation plants which in turn provide electricity used in the heating, pressure generation and subsequent cooling for that process, in which case it could be replaced by something renewable.
If it is the latter case I have to agree that it’s not quite as bad in the renewable sense as I thought.
Oil and Natural gas are not required. Ammonia is nitrogen and hydrogen.
It is why solar powered fertilizer factories exist.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/small-green-ammonia-plant-farm-kenya#:~:text=A small fertilizer plant%2C built,applied to crops as fertilizer.
Good news.
Guess my info on that was quite outdated.