Phosphorus Doom
April 22nd, 2010This is a top national security issue for New Zealand. Whether or not most New Zealanders are aware of it, I have no idea: Will fertiliser scarcity harm farm economy?
New Zealand, apart from a tiny urea plant Ballance Agri-Nutrients operates out of Kapuni, Taranaki, imports all its fertiliser ingredients.
For individual New Zealanders who are into producing their own food, never forget: Seaweed Comes Ashore:
A balanced organic fertilizer can be created by mixing fresh seaweed or seaweed meal with manure or fishmeal, both of which supply sufficient phosphorus. Seaweed is also a good soil conditioner and can add as much humus to the soil as manure can.
Also, in my opinion, this should also be on the required reading list for everyone: The Humanure Handbook by Joseph C. Jenkins
Free legal download of the entire third (latest) edition of the book.
Via: Spiegel:
Just four countries — Morocco, China, South Africa and Jordan — control 80 percent of the world’s reserves of usable phosphate. Morocco is a particularly important exporter, the Saudi Arabia of phosphorus, if you will. Its reserves were formed millions of years ago, when animal and plankton remains were deposited as sediments on the floor of a shallow, warm sea. Morocco’s fossil treasure makes up about 37 percent of world reserves.
Europe, on the other hand, has almost no reserves of its own, and it depends on imports to satisfy 90 percent of its demand. Phosphorus is a “geostrategic ticking time bomb,” warns David Vaccari, a professor of environmental engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. “We may eventually be driven to implement a high degree of recycling as resources become depleted,” he says. “The sooner we implement recycling technologies, the longer the current resources will last to ease the transition to the period when intense recycling may become imperative.”
Even the French writer Victor Hugo recognized the problem, interrupting his successful novel “Les Misérables” to devote several pages to a fiery plea in favor of using human fecal matter as fertilizer. “There is no guano comparable in fertility to the detritus of a capital,” he raved.
And now the novelist’s dream could finally come true. The industry is called “urban mining,” and in addition to recycling metal, glass and plastic, it could soon turn urban sewers into fertilizer mines. Sewage treatment plants accumulate almost 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of phosphate a year per resident.
see also:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4275
and:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4624
compost, limestone, rock dust, crushed seashells, seaweed-based soil amendments, crop rotation, permaculture forestry, perennial crops and manure (including human) are the ways to maintain healthy soil.
http://phosphorusfutures.net/peak-phosphorus
(rest of site good, too.)
and:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/182522-taking-stock-of-phosphorus-and-biofuels
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Germany suffer blockades in World War I that caused her scientists to explore ways of extracting nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer? Wasn’t it Fritz Haber? I know that nitrogen fertilizer is considered a big pollutant these days but if you didn’t live near seaweed…