From baguettes to beer, the world’s leading food and drinks makers are rushing to reduce their carbon footprint by tackling one of the hidden culprits of emissions in their value chains: fertilisers.
Ahead of disclosure rules for greenhouse emissions throughout their supply chains enacted next year, companies including PepsiCo, Heineken and Nestlé have turned to green fertiliser start-ups to help tackle emission levels.
Crop nutrients underpin production of half the world’s food but contribute significant CO₂ emissions at the same time. Fertilisers used for agricultural ingredients account for about 15 per cent of total emissions from beer supply chains and 35-40 per cent for bread, according to industry experts.
Nitrogen-based fertiliser and farm manure make up 5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, producing 2.6bn tonnes of CO₂ a year, more than global aviation and shipping combined, according to research published by the journal Nature Food.
You cannot feed 8 billion people with the arable land that we have available without synthetic fertilizer.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer
Even if we were to Thanos snap the world population and feed those people with only compost/manure/night soil, a large percentage of the labor force would need to go into food production, and cheap food would no longer be a possibility.
Farmers are using all the manure that they have available in the most efficient manner that the market will bear right now and even then I don’t know about any for profit farmer in my extension office who doesn’t use additional synthetic fertilizer.