Feeding the World Without Ruining It

Every so often, a paper turns up that brilliantly simplifies a complex function - in this case, industrial fertilizers' environmental impact, through the lens of the carbon and nitrogen cycles.

Earlier this year, independent academic journal The Conversation published a deep dive into the planetary boundary limits of nitrogen fertilizer. The article concludes that ‘feeding the world without ruining it’ will require three systemic changes to farmland management globally:

1. Reintroduce nitrogen-fixing legume crops ahead of planting cereals.

   1. Of note, researchers point out that GMO soybean-corn rotations aren’t working like a chickpea-wheat or lentil-barley sequence could, for example, to reduce chemical applications on fields.

2. Reintroduce managed grazing, as the only workable approach to localizing the nitrogen cycle and eliminating the need for commercial fertilizer application.

   1. Managed grazing has the added benefit of controlling the spread of herbicide-resistant weeds in a short period of time. Introducing grazing into cropland changes the business’s margin structure, but it does not have to add costs.

3. Create and enclose regional food supply chains to support balanced production and consumption.

   1. This aspect of alternative farming can reduce prices by increasing local production of actual food, and shrink the supply chain logistics associated with household purchases. It also offers improved nutrition in regionalized diets that would displace some ultra-processed foods for more legumes, whole grains and pastured meats.

To arrive at the above conclusions, researchers began with the ‘planetary boundary framework, developed by researchers in Science Advances. It is being used by scientists to track how human activities are impacting 9 processes critical for maintaining the stability of Earth systems on the whole, as shown below.

The ‘safe operating space’ for life on the planet to continue has been breached in the orange areas, including in the flow of nitrogen into the biosphere. Here’s how it works.

C:N

Carbon and nitrogen cycles have become adulterated in simple, sterile environments like monocrop broadacre grain fields. By contrast, consider the functional requirements of a healthy forest ecosystem: growing plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms.