There has been a great deal of angst from the DKos food crowd over the selection of Tom Vilsack as the Secretary of Agriculture. Despite their passions on this topic there was never any chance of that position being filled with anyone acceptable to them. The agriculture industry runs a close second behind big oil in terms of size and influence – it was always going to be one of their own for that job.
I'm not here to apologize for high fructose corn syrup, which I almost never consume because I don't want to be diabetic, nor will I wish anything for Monsanto but an anti-trust investigation, but you need to understand the following and learn it well.
50% of all protein consumed by humans gets its start as man made ammonia. Organic methods can't alter this simple mass balance problem.
There are indeed some changes in the wind, so please carefully examine the systems thinker's views below the fold ...
There are six and a half billion humans alive today and my estimate is that two out of every three wouldn't exist without the synthetic ammonia we've been making for the last century. I could do no better myself than the work that Peter Salonius has published on The Oil Drum regarding the history of agriculture and our current conditions.
My particular area of interest in the fertilizer N-P-K triad - (N)itrogen (P)hosphorus and (K)alium aka potassium - is specifically the nitrogen. Our atmosphere is 79% nitrogen but it's in a diatomic form and basically inert. We get natural, biologically available nitrogen a bit from lightning and the rest comes from the actions of bacteria. Certain plants, primarily legumes, host bacteria that fix nitrogen and they feed them sugars in exchange for their labors.
Man made nitrogen compounds always begin as ammonia, a combination of one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms. We make a hundred and forty million tons of this stuff a year, primarily for fertilizer use. The nitrogen used is always extracted from the atmosphere so it's the hydrogen sources that are the problem. We currently produce 70% of that global total with hydrogen rich natural gas, 30% comes from coal and petroleum coke, and a smidgen is made renewable with hydropower in Egypt, Zimbabwe, and Peru.
Ammonia can be applied directly to the soil and this is still done in some cases, but it requires more care in handling than other nitrogen fertilizer forms and it slaughters the soil microorganisms. Urea is a solid, crystalline substance high in biologically available nitrogen and another popular option for nitrogen delivery is called UAN, a liquid mixture of urea and ammonium nitrate. If phosphorus is also required MAP (mono-ammonia phosphate) or DAP (di-ammonium phosphate) are used. All of the derivative products are kinder to the soil than direct ammonia application.
So, about that mass balance problem; our population, distribution methods, and culture are what they are. Even with massive changes to our methods and how we live we've still got this problem of the population overshooting the solar maximum for a full on organic production system, no matter how pleasing that idea might be.
Our current ammonia production methods are problematic. Natural gas based production releases four tons of CO2 for every three tons of ammonia, while the coal based production releases four tons of CO2 for each ton of ammonia. The following table is taken from Bill McKibben's article in this month's Mother Jones except for the last one. I used the figures of 70% of ammonia being made with gas and 30% with coal to arrive at the 595 billion pounds of CO2 figure.
source | billion pounds | percent |
coal electric | 4300 | 33.32% |
transport | 4300 | 33.32% |
poor use of forest | 880 | 6.82% |
avoidable methane | 510 | 3.95% |
driving alone to work | 490 | 3.80% |
industrial waste heat | 160 | 1.24% |
phantom power | 153 | 1.19% |
inefficient industry machines | 150 | 1.16% |
junk mail | 114 | 0.88% |
home heating/cooling | 943 | 7.31% |
home hot water | 310 | 2.40% |
ammonia fertilizer | 595 | 4.61% |
So, in addition to the mass balance problem that means we must continue producing ammonia ... unless we're willing to accept massive casualties from starvation, we've also got a serious carbon dioxide emission problem.
Serious, and about to accelerate. Natural gas depletion will likely mean the end of exports from Canada and Trinidad in the next decade. Each of those export ammonia as well as natural gas. Coal and petroleum coke are the fossil fuel replacements, but coal produces three times the CO2 and petroleum coke produces four times the emissions of the natural gas method. We will cut back on oil simply due to depletion and it isn't hard to envision an all coal scenario where ten to twenty percent of CO2 emissions are fertilizer related.
There has to be a solution for this. The alternatives are famine, collapsing governments, war, and underlying all of that accelerating climate change. Something must be done.
Cultural changes, like eating a lot less meat, will obviously help. Local gardening provided 40% of the United States food requirements during world war II. Returning to this will be a huge step forward in reducing food miles and cutting oil use, but these are incremental improvements to something that is destined to break down.
This is a graph of per capita wheat harvest and year end wheat stocks. I used the USDA Yearbook for the wheat data and I cobbled the population numbers together from a variety of sources. We've been ending the season with seventy pounds per person for a long time, then three years ago the ending stocks plummeted to forty pounds.
I've already brought a bit of attention to the wheat stock problem. I'm worried that what is already going on in the global credit market has set up us for The Famine of 2009. I think we're already past a tipping point where we're going to see trouble in Pakistan, in Egypt, and in other places where poor populations depend on subsidized wheat. Peter Salonius suggests a China style one child per family policy on a global basis and centuries of climbdown from our existing position. I wish for that but I think George Monbiot's view is more realistic – we're going to end up fighting like cats in a sack.
This is a first draft of information that is going to industry, agriculture, and Congress over the next few weeks. I'm posting it here in this rough, bloggish form, in hopes it'll foment some interesting discussion and sharpen my understanding of the problems, both from an analytical as well as perceptual basis.