My family has owned a farm in Illinois since 1855. The changes over time in practices on that farm perfectly reflect the changes in American agriculture. My grandfather ran an early hybrid corn business. He would enter hybrid corn seed he had bred into production contests run by the University of Illinois around 1944. He would often place first or second with yields of around 92 bushels per acre. By the 1960’s that would be considered crop failure due to the post WW2 production of nitrogen fertilizer. A regime of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides was put together that enabled year after year production of corn on the same piece of land. On that farm spreading manure ceased, animals disappeared along with crop rotation.
About 1990 Dutch Friends of the Earth published a seminal report named Sustainable Netherlands that concluded that there were three kinds of substances that were serious threats to life: carbon dioxide, heavy metals and organic halogen compounds. Others were less serious and could be lived with.
Does your article imply that nitrogen should be included in the lot?
Yes, nitrogen certainly has huge environmental impacts. The planetary boundaries framework consider that the spread of reactive nitrogen is one of the areas where the safe space was left long time ago. But of course, we can "live with" it in the same way as we can with CO2.
My family has owned a farm in Illinois since 1855. The changes over time in practices on that farm perfectly reflect the changes in American agriculture. My grandfather ran an early hybrid corn business. He would enter hybrid corn seed he had bred into production contests run by the University of Illinois around 1944. He would often place first or second with yields of around 92 bushels per acre. By the 1960’s that would be considered crop failure due to the post WW2 production of nitrogen fertilizer. A regime of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides was put together that enabled year after year production of corn on the same piece of land. On that farm spreading manure ceased, animals disappeared along with crop rotation.
About 1990 Dutch Friends of the Earth published a seminal report named Sustainable Netherlands that concluded that there were three kinds of substances that were serious threats to life: carbon dioxide, heavy metals and organic halogen compounds. Others were less serious and could be lived with.
Does your article imply that nitrogen should be included in the lot?
Yes, nitrogen certainly has huge environmental impacts. The planetary boundaries framework consider that the spread of reactive nitrogen is one of the areas where the safe space was left long time ago. But of course, we can "live with" it in the same way as we can with CO2.