Huh? As was said, lightning extracts a lot of nitrogen from the air and is returned to earth through rain and snow. And certain aquaticmicroorganisms draw huge amounts of nitrogen from the air.

You may wish to read up on the nitrogen cycle.

Wayne

Lots of soil microbes convert atmospheric nitrogen to organic nitrogen. You see it mostly on legume roots - Nodules form that are full of bacteria that are converting nitrogen in the atmosphere to organic nitrogen. This is why you don't need to fertilize legumes with nitrogen.

My question is. Without the Haber process, would there be enough fixed nitrogen to raise the crops necessary to feed the world? Or would crop productivity drop to the levels where there is not enough farmland to grow all the food? Keeping in mind that bacteria are also putting nitrogen back ito the air as well.

Keep in mind that even with organic fertilizers, at some point much of the nitrogen came from the Haber process even if it is several steps removed.

I think I found my own answer. If anyone is interested I left a link. scroll towards the bottom and the article touches on the controversy.

IMO, growing organically, enriching the population of soil microbes and good rotation such as in the ATTRA document, is more likely to feed the world long term than with synthetic inputs.

These people are not secretive about their "secret." In fact they give seminars, free, to help their neighbors learn how to produce cattle with low external input. But since "their daddies didn't do it that way," they can't bring themselves to change.

So there seems to be enough nitrogen in parts of Texas. The only problem is most of the producers don't know how to use it all.

Don't get me wrong here I'm definitely pro organic. I think that totally organic crops and livestock is possible, but I think It would take alot more planning and education. And nitrogen could be a limiting factor Maybe not but it is a valid concern. I think it is interesting that large scale farms are getting it done. It could indicate it is possible to do it worldwide, but it has not been proven. The worlds current population has never been fed organically and it has not been proven to be possible or feasible. It is an academic but also an important question

Likely the pro-chemical argument originated with a fertilizer manufacturer, don't you think? But then, I'm always suspicious of any argument that tells us we "can't afford" not to poison the well.
-O

These folks talk in terms of banking sunlight in the grass. The best way to bank the sunlight is to grow grass on 100% of the surface area. Most livestock producers allow their grass to be overgrazed to the point where it does not cover the land completely. These folks have developed a way to keep that from happening. By banking the sunlight energy in the plants, the animals can convert it later into muscle where it is banked again. Then when the animals get sold for meat the sunlight bank gets cashed in. The method works with cattle, reindeer, goats, sheep, rabbits, geese, and any other herbivore in any environment.

There's one producer in Virginia who takes 2 months off every year to write about his experience. Search the Internet and your library for Joel Salatin. While Salatin does not claim to use HRM, he does acknowledge the benefits. In practice he does use most of their methods to produce incredible amounts of beef, chicken, eggs, hogs, and rabbits from 150 acres. Salatin claims his methods have produced his own breed (my word, not necessarily his) of cattle which is resistant to disease and reliable in production. He also claims to grow 1 inch of new soil per year by careful management of the animals across it. If I make it sound too good to be true, read his books where he covers the methods in copious detail.

Another resource you will find in both of the above searches is Acres USA. There you can read about the day to day lives of HRM types of folks. The founder of HRM, an African named Allan Savory, claims to be able to restore desert to farmland by proper animal management. There are documented examples of this in our country and less documented examples on every continent. You'll find references to other examples in your searching. I am familiar with the Arizona example and can say it is nothing if not a miracle. Briefly, they used cattle to turn strip mine tailings (basically nutrient free dust) into pasture in one season. My cousins lived in that town and we visited twice a year when I was young. Nothing grows on those piles - until now. If the technique of capturing the waste nitrogen from the livestock can turn those dust piles in the Sonoran desert into pasture, they can work anywhere.

The question is useless, therefor.

Perhaps you will agree that the land surface of the planet is and has been for quite some time and will continue for any future that matters in human time-scale, finite? Whereas populations fluctuate, sometimes wildly. I'm aware of what arable is, and I'm also aware that food production can occur on land surfaces that most agriculturalists would consider to be not arable. Based on the sheer volume of plant bio-mass on the planet, and the fact that it commonly grows on any and all land surfaces when allowed by climate and humans, nitrogen doesn't seem like a limiting factor.

I've been growing and producing food now for six years or so without fertilizer other than some initial compost. The yields are small, but consistent. Fertility increase cycles can be created that are largely independent of inputs other than sunshine and water.

I agree.

finnbiker: What kind of Pennsylvanian are you? What's wrong with Penn State?

Can the earth support the current world population by current methods, sustainably? No.

Can the earth support the current world population without petroleum-based fertilizers and with far less use of animal-based foods? Possibly.

Some people think that clearing trees, as we have been doing since far before the discovery of fossil fuels, affects climate - and some people think that this may be more of a problem than fossil fuel use (sort of out of the mainstream, but they have a few pieces of evidence to back them up.)

It's hard to know how human activities on the planet affect the planet, and it's hard to know what the long term carrying capacity is on the planet. It does seem to me that 'arable land' might not be as great as we'd initially think - it's possible that we need huge swaths of forest to keep climate etc in a good zone.

So many tangents to this discussion - I was talking earlier today with someone about the drought in Texas, and the Dakotas. If drought is a result of climate change, then we'd again need to reevaluate what the available arable land area is.

Alternative energies don't offer any equivalent to petroleum-derived fertilizers (so far as I am aware), so yields will plummet as there will be nothing to stand between conventional ag and the barren soils it has created. Soil fertility will creep up as the much land will fallow for some years, and farmers will re-learn how to live with the "nitrogen cycle" - IOW, proper rotation, cover-cropping, and re-integrating domestic animals into the growth cycle.

You could easily grow your own food on a smallish lot without introducing more nitrogen, once a good cycle is established in reasonable living regions (deserts- need much more space). This would be an intensive process. As for a farming operation- it becomes a bit less manageable to take nutrient out of the system continuously, unless you allow that waste is trucked back in.

Legumes fix nitrogen straight out of the air. I grow a good amount of green manure legumes. Grow them, and use them directly as fertilizer. They will sustain gardening on-site, but other nutrients are taken up for use in this process. You'd probably end up with micro-nutrient deficiency before any real N deficiency was a problem if you grow enough legumes if food (containing those nutrients) is grown in one place and shipped out to market.

Low nitrogen compostables may be processed in-situ by use of a variety of fungi, so that nutrient is made surprisingly available. The right symbiotic fungi associations- even when not used as an innoculant, but just grown alongside crops, can do surprising things for nutrient availability. Their use has been proven in clearcut remediation sites, gardening, waste processing, and bioremediation of a number of fuels and chemicals. They can make what once seemed like "wood byproduct", or a serious brown, into a fairly well rounded nutrient source.

I'm going to attach a very interesting (and short) article for you to read.

However, he avoids the uncomfortable conclusion of his facts, which I compute to be widespread starvation and malnuirishment when the petro-fertilizers run short. Thus it behooves us to educate as many people as possible on small-scale food production with very low inputs. And we ourselves are nitro-producers, it's well to remember.

I think a lot of valid points have been made and understood that the larger issue behind the question involves many more factors than just nitrogen, but I think the hypothetical question still is very thought provoking.

My inclination is to think that Nitrogen won't be the limiting factor in feeding the world.
((One very important thing to remember is that with the food production that we have right now in the world, with all the synthetic fertilizers etc. there are still millions of undernourished people...WHY? Because of distribution.)) We waste a lot of food, the people who need it dont get it, we waste a lot of nitrogen(food scraps,humanure,urine, etc).

I believe that if we are more careful and more judicious with what we have and we work on making efficient cycles (by watching nature) we will be able to feed people better than industrial agriculture.

thanks for the article by Michael Pollan that was great!

Bill

The reason the topic is verboten in discussion, is because once you start suggesting legislating how many kids people can have (or even hinting that this would be appropriate) you enmesh yourself in the sorts of mess that issues like RvW sees.

Reproduction is a very personal function and decision, by and large. (Sometimes it's just an accident). In either case, taking steps to control it is distasteful - and possibly a very slippery slope.

Education would be appropriate, however.

1) Best estimates say that 2 out of every 10 people are infected with HIV worldwide. The majority of folks infected are in A) africa B) opium routes out of China. This includes the former USSR: best exemplar of the problem that is slowly creeping. The confluence of HIV and Hepatitis spread by dirty needles on the Opium routes means that the pool of folks needed to draw from to replace the baby boomers who will be retiring IS TOO SMALL. There are NOT ENOUGH uninfected people (police, armed forces, gov't workers) to replace those who will be retiring. Worldwide, te WHO has already put out advisory memos, quietly, that there may not be room to bury the bodies...cremation is suggested.

2) The US imports over half of its raw materials, and over two-thirds of its manufactured goods (thank you, Walmart).

3) Most of these imports come from...you guessed it!...China, the USSR, and Africa.

4) Of all the second and first world countries, the only one with a positive growth rate of over 2.1% is the US, and that's boosted with immigration.

5) We're having droughts all over the world. The Steppes of Asia are nearly bare. Whole breeds, whole types of grazing animals are dying. Nomadic cultures are dispersing from the larger deforested or depraried areas into congested cities.

Conclusion: look for world population growth to flatten out, then start to downturn. The global increase of city size, decrease of rural population, and increase of city population infections will increase disease spread and mortality rates. The US will be hard-pressed to get its factories and refineries in working order again in time to stabilize its economy, if it's possible at all. The rest of the world will have large amounts of trouble with infrastructure collapse of entire countries as top-heavy populations must demanding support from too small of a young workforce.

"How many of you have actually made something with your hands?" In a JC class of 50+, I was the only one who raised their hands. Quite an education...I hope educating women out of having babies and men away from learning how to brick up a chimney or butcher a hog will help when steel imports stop entirely, or there's really nobody left to pump gas, or mine those diamonds, or man the ships that bring Walmart goods in from China.

"Is there enough Nitrogen" implies a continual population growth, or at least, a stable population. This is not possible -- the Malthusian equation is up and running. The question isn't "Is there enough Nitrogen", the question is "will there be enough people around who still know how to create, to grow, to manufacture, to supply, to keep the world's economy (and therefore culture) going?"

Probably not. Learning to compost, water conservation and gardening where irrigation is not a necessity, and the general good equation that you need 5 acres of green material to create enough compost/Nitrogen/minerals/green manure to resupply 1 acre of farmed land, might be a good idea to look into. In the meantime, I can tune a mean 6-cylinder, knit a good pair of socks, put up my own veggies, do carpentry, and never bother with the state of my nails so long as they're clean. Nothing wrong with what hard work does to hands. How many of us know that now...how many of us are just looking for a way to get the next Beemer?

Nitrogen? RESOURCES. Manpower. Raw materials. Preservation of knowledge and techniques and seed stock. That's what I'm concerned over.

End spoiler.

Cuba learned to feed it's country with organic's

Problem with organic's is distribution, farmers in WI, burn piles of manure because they can't get rid of it.

A couple Bishops in Africa claim that GMO's only benefit the
manufacturer.

Young farmers can't afford to buy farms, So many of todays farms will be lost to taxes.

I think we will see local food-production increase dramatically in the US and Canada from here on. There is more than enough nitrogen produced out of the very eaters in suburban areas, and in rural areas there is generally a surfeit of animal waste.

How did Ally OOPP(?) club a woman and drag her back to his cave?

Might have to learn that one again :-)

But one hopes that the pressure exerted by declining fuel stocks and expense will cause growers to look seriously at other fertilizer sources.