fred first's List: Soils

• The primary sources for the hydrogen used in ammonia manufacture today are natural gas and coal
• The discovery of ammonia synthesis by Fritz Haber and subsequent commercialization by Carl Bosch in 1910 freed the human race of the need to worry about a source of nitrogen fertilizer for a century
• It can be argued that ammonia is perhaps the most critical manmade substance to the existence of human society

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• The inherent fertility of soil used to be an important factor in food production. Now it’s more or less irrelevant. Modern industrial agriculture now depends on the use of high inputs of nonrenewable resources, particularly oil, gas and fertilizer raw materials, to keep crops growing. Our future is so heavily mortgaged to the exploitation of such agricultural inputs that we have overshot the ability of the planet to support us in a sustainable way. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the overshoot at about 25 percent. In other words, modern society is living off global principal. Anybody with a bank account knows that living off principal rather than just the interest is an unsustainable option.
• • Anthrobleme:a scar on the earth caused by mankind's activities
• This rate of degradation appears to be between one and two orders of magnitude faster than the average rate at which soils form — a recipe for unsustainability. Thus, 10,000 years ago, there was more soil than there is now: Peak Soil happened at least 10 millennia ago.
• As for the second requirement, we talk a good game, especially in academia, but the fact is that in spite of our big brains, a sustainable system of farming has eluded us for 10,000 years. The problem is, when the fashion is to couple sustainability with development, it will be impossible ever to achieve true sustainability. Nonetheless, sustainable agriculture would undoubtedly be a good thing, if we could find a way to achieve it.

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• Pakistan’s two large reservoirs, Mangla and Tarbela, which store Indus River water for the country’s vast irrigation network, are losing roughly 1 percent of their storage capacity each year as they fill with silt from deforested watersheds.
• Ethiopia, a mountainous country with highly erodible soils, is losing close to 2 billion tons of topsoil a year, washed away by rain.
• While the United States, a country with comparable grazing capacity, has 97 million cattle, China has a slightly smaller herd of 82 million. But while the United States has only 9 million sheep and goats, China has 284 million. Concentrated in China’s western and northern provinces, sheep and goats are destroying the land’s protective vegetation. The wind then does the rest, removing the soil and converting productive rangeland into desert.
• 1950 to 1975 an average of 600 square miles turned to desert each year. By century's end, nearly 1,400 square miles (3,600 square kilometers) were going to desert annually. Over the last half-century, some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been entirely or partly abandoned as a result of being overrun by drifting sand.
• • Brazilian cerado expansion for cropland threatens to turn rain forest into desert
• A third massive cropland expansion is now taking place in the Brazilian Amazon Basin and in the cerrado, a savannah-like region bordering the basin on its south side. Land in the cerrado, like that in the U.S. and Soviet expansion, is vulnerable to soil erosion. This cropland expansion is pushing cattle ranchers into the Amazon forests, where ecologists are convinced that continuing to clear the area of trees will end in disaster. Reporter Geoffrey Lean, summarizing the findings of a 2006 Brazilian scientific symposium in London’s Independent, notes that the alternative to a rainforest in the Amazon would be “dry savannah at best, desert at worst.” 
  

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• The world is losing soil 10 to 20 times faster than it is replenishing it. At the same time, population is growing exponentially – 9.3 billion by 2050, according to UN projections.
• It takes tens of thousands of years to make 15 centimeters of topsoil, about 6 inches' worth.
• So, the world is facing a hydrocarbons peak, right as we are beginning to struggle with soil, the nutrients required for large scale agriculture, environmental change and availability of water. When you put the disparate elements together, it begins to look like a perfect storm.

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• Blame Peak Oil. Not only is demand for fertilizer up, but it is made from natural gas, which has increased in cost along with oil. Five percent of the world's natural gas is used in making it
• Blame Meat. In the United States almost half of the fertilizer is used for feed or pasture. As demand for meat grows with Asia's exploding middle class, more fertilizer is needed per calorie of food delivered, since meat is such an inefficient way of delivering calories.

• “Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.”
  —Dutch saying
• the net effect of synthetic nitrogen use is to reduce soil's organic matter content. Why? Because, they posit, nitrogen fertilizer stimulates soil microbes, which feast on organic matter. Over time, the impact of this enhanced microbial appetite outweighs the benefits of more crop residues
• As organic matter dissipates, soil's ability to store organic nitrogen declines. A large amount of nitrogen then leaches away, fouling ground water in the form of nitrates, and entering the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N2O), a greenhouse gas with some 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide. In turn, with its ability to store organic nitrogen compromised, only one thing can help heavily fertilized farmland keep cranking out monster yields: more additions of synthetic N.

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• Several hundred scientists from across the globe will gather in Ludwigshafen, Germany, next week to discuss a simple topic: "A hundred years of the synthesis of ammonia." As titles go, it is scarcely a grabber. Yet the subject could hardly be of greater importance, for the gathering on 11 November will focus on the centenary of an industrial process that has transformed our planet and threatens to bring even greater, more dramatic changes over the next 100 years.
• by churning out ammonia in industrial quantities for the first time, triggering a green revolution. Several billion people are alive today only because Haber found a way to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia fertiliser. "Bread from air," ran the slogan that advertised his work at the time.
• "If you look at the impact of the Haber process on the planet, you can see that it has been greater than any other discovery or industrial process over the past 100 years,"
• In addition, there is the pollution triggered by the release of ammonia fertilisers into water supplies across the globe and into the atmosphere.
• The ironies that afflicted Haber's life continued in death. One of the most effective insecticides he had helped to develop was Zyklon B, which was subsequently used by the Nazis to murder more than a million people, including members of Haber's extended family, including children of his sisters and cousins.
• In 1900 there were 1.6 billion people on Earth. There are now more than 7 billion. Most of the extra mouths have been fed on food sustained by the Haber-Bosch process.
• It has been calculated that half the nitrogen atoms in our bodies come from a Haber factory, via its fertilisers and the food nourished by them. As the Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil has put it in his book Enriching the Earth, the Haber-Bosch process "has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than the airplane, nuclear energy, spaceflight or television".
• Nitrogen fertilisers get washed into streams, rivers, lakes and coastal areas where they feed algae that spread in thick carpets over the waters, suffocating life below.
• Sutton believes that while the dangers of fossil fuels and greenhouse gases are well known today, those of the nitrogen cycle, which affects drinking water, contributes to air pollution and affects the health of large parts of the population, have gone unrecognised. "We need nitrogen compounds to sustain our food supply but we need to be much more careful how we use them. That is the real lesson of the Haber process centenary."

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• "Business as usual would mean a huge and simultaneous increase in the need for food, energy and water in the next decades: 60 percent more food, 50 percent more energy and 40 percent more water by 2050," Graziano da Silva said during his remarks.

  FAO estimates point to the need to increase food production by 60 percent by 2050 to feed a population that will top the 9 billion mark.

• FAO estimates that a third of all soils are degraded, due to erosion, compaction, soil sealing, salinization, soil organic matter and nutrient depletion, acidification, pollution and other processes caused by unsustainable land management practices.

    Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person will in 2050 be only one-fourth of the level in 1960.
• “Soil is also the largest pool of organic carbon, which is essential for mitigating and adapting to climate change. In an era of water scarcity, soils are fundamental for its appropriate storage and distribution,” said Mr. Ban, urging all States to pledge to do more to protect this important yet forgotten resource. “A healthy life is not possible without healthy soils,” he declared.