[HN Gopher] Farm in Kenya to produce fossil-free fertilizer on site
___________________________________________________________________
Farm in Kenya to produce fossil-free fertilizer on site
Author : chmaynard
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-10-11 13:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| elil17 wrote:
| The title should really say ammonia fertilizer.
|
| Of course compost is also fertilizer, and farms have been
| producing that on site for a long, long time.
|
| That said, huge win!
| User23 wrote:
| In the USA we used to just spray sludge, but that's largely been
| banned. A shame because it works really well and scales with
| population.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| why was this banned?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| You're spreading (often) human waste over a field. There are
| a lot more pathogen risks this way.
| interestica wrote:
| The dream is still human waste diversion and treatment
| (separation, treatment, reuse). There are a couple small-scale
| projects looking at feasibility.
|
| Right now the norm is to combine wastes, add it to drinking
| water, and then spend a lot of money to get the water out of it
| again.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| From a first principles perspective, would I be able to grow
| enough food for me from the waste fertiliser from me? my
| intuition is that there wouldn't be enough
| lasermike026 wrote:
| Book: The Alchemy of Air
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this sounds awesome, i hope it remains viable. would love to see
| something like this scale
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This is actually exciting. Converting carbon free energy (such as
| solar and wind) into chemical energy is I think one of the more
| promising approaches. One of the big challenges of solar and wind
| is matching instantaneous supply with instantaneous demand.
|
| By converting it to chemical energy, you can basically take the
| solar output that you get and use it. If you get more, you
| produce more, if you get less, you produce less. It is adaptable
| to the supply.
| usrnm wrote:
| Well, all farms in the world used to produce their own fertilizer
| without using fossil fuels. It's called 'manure'. Just nitpicking
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah, it's definitely a pretty odd headline, considering many
| millions of farmers use the good ol' fashioned method to this
| day.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| just shit in a field bro
| 7373737373 wrote:
| How much agricultural land can 1 ton of ammonia fertilize?
| cannonpalms wrote:
| This will depend entirely on the requirements of the crop. You
| won't get a generic answer per unit area.
| hedora wrote:
| It also depends on soil properties.
|
| However, 100-200 lbs of fertilizer per acre is somewhat
| reasonable, so it's probably on the order of 10-100 acres per
| ton of nitrogen atoms.
|
| Source (this is an article about measuring available
| nitrogen, and their examples are in the 100-200 lbs per acre
| range):
|
| https://www.agry.purdue.edu/Ext/corn/news/timeless/AssessAva.
| ..
| Mistletoe wrote:
| > A 200-bushel corn crop requires about 200 to 250 pounds
| nitrogen per acre.
|
| So that's about 240 lbs per acre of anhydrous ammonia.
|
| https://www.rs.uky.edu/soil/calculators/mult_fert.php
| delecti wrote:
| The other comment is probably right, that this varies widely,
| but getting a vague order of magnitude is still useful. From
| some amateur googling, it seems that an acre requires on the
| order of 100 lbs/year (50-300lbs, though the higher figures
| seem to also include things other than just nitrogen/ammonia).
|
| So 1 ton/day (assuming metric tonnage), would be in the range
| of 8000 acres/year, though with obviously large error bars.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This approach (eliminating fossil fuels from the nitrogen
| fertilizer pipeline) will inevitably become the global norm. For
| Africa in particular, it's the only plausible route to long-term
| food stability as there simply isn't enough fossil fuel available
| to allow Africa to industrialize (and if there was, we'd be
| doubling the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere). Africa has
| the opportunity to go directly from pre-industrial agrarian
| economy to a renewable energy-powered industrial economy.
| purpleblue wrote:
| When I read articles like this, I can totally understand China
| and India's argument as to why they won't or don't prioritize
| fossil fuel consumption.
|
| The West has spent centuries modernizing itself to the point
| where there is a vast gap between the West and the rest of the
| world. Now that the West has a huge advantage, they want to start
| imposing moral arguments on the 3rd world nations as to why they
| should abide by the West's new set of moral codes, which handcuff
| the progress that 3rd world countries can make.
|
| This feels like another example of where I bet it would be
| cheaper to do it in other ways (besides using Russian ammonia)
| but they decided to try the "green" way. It also feels a lot like
| how Monsanto tricked Indian farmers into using their seeds which
| required Roundup and then became indentured servants for the rest
| of their lives because of the financial handcuffs put on them.
|
| So I can completely sympathize why many poorer countries can see
| all these environmental moral edicts as being ways to keep them
| oppressed and tricked into not making progress independently from
| the West.
| elil17 wrote:
| >It also feels a lot like how Monsanto tricked Indian farmers
| into using their seeds which required Roundup and then became
| indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the
| financial handcuffs put on them.
|
| I think it's actually the exact opposite of this. The farm now
| has a fertilizer factory that produces fertilizer for free.
| They are no longer reliant on buying ammonia from big
| companies.
| newfriend wrote:
| > The West has spent centuries modernizing itself to the point
| where there is a vast gap between the West and the rest of the
| world.
|
| The West has spent centuries inventing and iterating on
| technology which is now available to the rest of the world, and
| has experienced how environmental hazards are created, which we
| want to avoid repeating.
|
| The West also handcuffs itself with environmental morality (see
| infrastructure development in China vs the US). We have
| experience with pollution and want to avoid countries and
| continents of 1b+ people making the Earth uninhabitable.
| hannob wrote:
| You seem to confuse "physics" with "moral arguments". They are
| profoundly different.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| All it takes to change that opinion is to spend a few winter
| days out in the smog-choked capital of India. That had quickly
| built an appreciation in me for even the current state of
| pollution controls in the West, where the air getting that bad
| is considered 'historic' (eg the Canadian wildfire smoke that
| passed through NY back in June).
| hannob wrote:
| It may come as a surprise to people (it certainly was a surprise
| to me), but actually there was a quite substantial renewable
| ammonia industry in the past in some countries, e.g. in Iceland
| and Norway. It eventually couldn't compete against cheap fossil
| gas though...
|
| See e.g.: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-4079/3/2/11
| aragonite wrote:
| I wonder how much more expensive this process is than the
| conventional approach.
|
| Apparently 'five times as expensive' according to Vaclav Smil
| (who is very pessimistic about rapid decarbonization) in How the
| World Works (2022):
|
| > In terms of the second category, as I will detail in the next
| chapter, synthesis of the ammonia needed to produce nitrogenous
| fertilizers now depends heavily on natural gas as the source of
| hydrogen. Hydrogen could be produced by the decomposition
| (electrolysis) of water instead, but this route remains nearly
| five times as expensive as when the element is derived from
| abundant and inexpensive methane -- and we have yet to create a
| mass-scale hydrogen industry.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| the absurdity is, there would be enough nitrogen in waste
| water, but bacteria in the sewage plants release it into air
| Y_Y wrote:
| > The Kenya Nut Company, near Nairobi, will be the first farm in
| the world to produce fertilizer, on site, that's free of fossil
| fuels.
|
| Hardly. They're just using a new ammonia synthesis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fertilizer
| pstuart wrote:
| It's using solar energy as input, where's the fossil fuels?
|
| This development is exciting and hopefully spreads everywhere.
| Farmers being able to make their own fertilizer (at least on
| the nitrogen side), is a huge win.
| maxbond wrote:
| Without commenting on the merits of this technique,
| composting is as old as the hills and doesn't necessarily
| involve fossil fuels.
| pstuart wrote:
| Composting has value too -- I'm a fan of permaculture. But
| as noted elsewhere, this scales well and becomes one tool
| of many.
| hedora wrote:
| Composting is to atmospheric nitrogen fixing (this type of
| process) as recycling is to mining.
|
| Before people could pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere,
| wars were fought over guano deposits, etc.
|
| At this point, the majority of nitrogen in human biomass
| comes from the Haber-Bosch process.
|
| (I'm not arguing against composting, to be clear!)
| sparrowInHand wrote:
| Its also doesent scale. Medieval farming for industrial
| societies gave us the atrocities of WW2 including
| Lebensraum.
| pjc50 wrote:
| WW2 could not have happened without Haber ammonia .. for
| explosives.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The Industrial Revolution couldn't have happened without
| the Agricultural Revolution that preceded and accompanied
| it, freeing up workers for industry.
|
| In medieval times most of the population were farmers by
| necessity. In the UK, output per acre tripled and the
| proportion of the population in farming went from 60% to
| 20% in 1840. And the UK was still almost entirely self
| sufficient at this time, food imports only became
| substantial in the late 1800s.
|
| Similar changes happened across Europe, though timing
| varied by country with the spread of industrialisation.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revo
| lut...
| hedora wrote:
| What?
|
| The Germans pioneered modern fertilizer production in the
| 1890s-1910s.
| walleeee wrote:
| Solar panels cannot currently be manufactured, distributed or
| repaired at any serious scale without fossil fuels.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| While that is true, it is misleading. If you can use a
| fixed quantity of fossil fuels to generate many decades of
| carbon free energy, the change to the overall lifecycle
| carbon requirements are very different.
|
| Just like in algorithms, making it an O(1) rather than O(n)
| solution, even with a large constant factor, can make an
| enormous difference over time.
| walleeee wrote:
| Your point is also true. I would contest the notion that
| mine is misleading, given that the parent asks, "where
| are the fossil fuels?"
| hedora wrote:
| True, but the solar panels displace way more fossil fuels
| than were used to produce them, so their net consumption of
| fossil fuels is negative.
| MayeulC wrote:
| This says more about the industry than about solar panels,
| you could say this about any product. There isn't anything
| inherently carbon-intensive about solar panel production.
|
| And if you compare the distribution of these solar panels
| with the distribution of the equivalent amount of nitrogen
| produced, I bet the panels require a lot less carbon for
| transportation. Not to mention not relying on a nitrogen
| producer (Russia), and additional uses for the panels.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Farmers have been able to do this for a very long time, but
| the process is very inefficient and messy when done at scale.
| Certainly these are good strides forward though!
| leblancfg wrote:
| History tidbit: before the Haber process was discovered, most
| commercial fertilizer was calcium cyanamide
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_cyanamide) as a downstream
| product from calcium carbide - one of the first industrial
| chemistry processes.
|
| In the late 1800s - early 1900s this was done along many
| riverside cities in Eastern US and Canada, because of cheap hydro
| power generated by dams.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How did they produce the nitrogen gas?
| contravariant wrote:
| Just open a window I suppose.
| mlinhares wrote:
| I LOLed hard at this.
| blueflow wrote:
| Second paragraph in the linked Wikipedia article.
| soperj wrote:
| Don't know why you're being downvoted when you have
| provided the answer.
|
| "In their search for a new process for producing cyanides
| for cyanide leaching of gold, Frank and Caro discovered the
| ability of alkaline earth carbides to absorb atmospheric
| nitrogen at high temperatures."
| ww520 wrote:
| Kenya has an amazing run in economic growth over the years. The
| key was their heavy investment in agriculture and related
| technologies. With food security, the other aspects of the
| economy simply flourish.
| spenrose wrote:
| A number of commenters are pointing out that natural fertilizers
| exist. That is true. It is also true that artificial fertilizers
| were invented because around 1900 humanity ran out of
| biologically accessible ("fixed") nitrogen that it could convert
| to crops. The key nitrogen atom in roughly half of the amino
| acids in your body was part of a nitrogen-nitrogen pair floating
| in the atmosphere until it was fixed in a factory. If all the
| factories making fertilizers shut down tomorrow, there would be
| mass famine.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| An additional issue is that a good fraction of 'organic
| nitrogen fertilizer' comes in the form of fish meal. This isn't
| a very environmentally friendly or sustainable approach,
| however - e.g. at peak extraction, 2/3 of sardine fishery
| production on the US west coast was being converted into crop
| fertilizer (mid 20th century).
|
| Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer
| fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the
| fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a
| big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and
| selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed
| (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of
| course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy
| as it could greatly reduce demand.
| searine wrote:
| >Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference
|
| Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it
| is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole.
|
| However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI
| to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs
| for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.
| Retric wrote:
| It's not nearly so dire because the majority of farmland isn't
| raising crops for direct human consumption. 40% of US corn is
| turned into ethanol and the majority of the remainder is used
| to feed livestock who burn calories by exiting.
|
| In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock
| would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of
| biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption.
| It's less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than
| starvation.
|
| Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things
| like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely
| motivating to get alternatives working.
| searine wrote:
| >Longer term you get different crops and even a return to
| things like crop rotation.
|
| Farmers never stopped doing crop rotation.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal
| food chain).
|
| Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't
| mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of
| quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still
| a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.
| Delphiza wrote:
| Yes, the world did not respond neatly to a shortage of
| toilet paper. In the event of a shortage of animal-based
| protein, I would expect the response would be worse than
| the toilet paper wars.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Yes but...
|
| Some of the famines in the 1940s werent natural famines, they
| were due to war and colonizing forces, see:
|
| https://nitter.net/i/status/1210635179221348352 (linking to
| Winston Churchill associates with Indian famine deaths:
| https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/03/29/asia/churchill-bengal-fam...
| )
|
| The other part of our predicament is that excess nitrogen
| impacts water supplies (see http://e360.yale.edu/features/the-
| nitrogen-problem-why-globa... ) and creates ocean dead zones (
| see https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/deadzone.html ,
| https://oceantoday.noaa.gov/happenowdeadzone/ )
| KaiserPro wrote:
| yes, however now, we have soil turned to sand and really
| aggressive nitrogen run off because it doesn't pay to manage
| the soil properly.
|
| In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting
| how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about
| nitrogen runoff.)
|
| Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means
| that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't
| generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher
| temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much
| water, you get worse flooding.
|
| Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite.
| lots of shite.
| cornholio wrote:
| To add to this: livestock make up 62% of the world's mammal
| biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%.
|
| Humanity, and especially the meat eating subspecies, is just a
| side effect of the Haber-Bosch reaction.
| [deleted]
| d4nt wrote:
| "Subspecies" feels a bit othering. Humans have been eating
| meat since Homo erectus (about 2M years).
| riedel wrote:
| No sustained increase in zooarchaeological evidence for
| carnivory after the appearance of Homo erectus [1].
|
| [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2115540119
| MadcapJake wrote:
| I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything
| we're learning about other human species is showing they
| also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came
| to be.
| soperj wrote:
| > The evolution of these traits is commonly linked to a
| major dietary shift involving increased consumption of
| animal tissues.
|
| I've never heard of this linkage. I've always heard it
| was on account of cooking the meat, rather than eating
| more of it.
| losteric wrote:
| Yep, 2MM years of eating meat - it's definitely weird to
| suggest meat eating humans are a new "subspecies" rather
| than the historical norm.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the
| world are just fine without meat, it's not like we have to
| eat it. Could even be better for us not to.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-11 16:00 UTC)