Farmers Are Fighting Over Fertilizer As Agriculture’s Impact on the Environment Becomes Undeniable

There is a reason for that. Agricultural emissions are 10% of total national emissions and are growing every year, up 33% since 1990.1 Most of those emissions come from nitrogen oxides that come from the use of fertilizer. And while everyone talks about carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxides are often ignored. Fertilizer has not been ignored on Treehugger. We have noted that nitrogen fertilizer is made through the Haber-Bosch process: “Fertilizer is made from ammonia, 

Source: Farmers Are Fighting Over Fertilizer As Agriculture’s Impact on the Environment Becomes Undeniable

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which is made from hydrogen, which is made from natural gas. That makes it a fossil fuel product; for every molecule of ammonia produced, a molecule of CO2 is a co-product, so when we eat food made with nitrogen fertilizers, we are essentially eating fossil fuels.” That alone could be responsible for 2% of global emissions. But what happens after the fertilizer is spread could be even more critical.

When nitrogen fertilizer is applied to soil, some is taken up by the plants, but according to Carbon Brief, much of it leaches out of soil or is washed into rivers or other bodies of water, feeding algae and releasing methane. “A third portion is lost to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times as powerful as CO2. Microbes in the soil can break down the nitrogen fertilizers applied to a field to produce nitrous oxide.”

The Canadian complainers say fertilizer cutbacks will lead to lower food production and loss of income. Everybody is quoting a report from Fertilizer Canada—”an industry association representing Canadian manufacturers, wholesalers and retail distributors of nitrogen, phosphate and potash fertilizers”—which is far from an unbiased source. The report says “a focus on an absolute emissions reduction, rather than an intensity-based target, is misplaced and will likely cause severe economic harm.” …The farmers say that doesn’t matter because the world needs more food, but a lot of those crops are used to feed animals, not people. In Canada, it is over 80%.² As environmental scientist Mark Sutton told Carbon Brief, much depends on what we eat for dinner: “Had we not been eating high-meat diets, the world could have clearly fed more people with less fertilizer.”