Improving Nitrogen Efficiency
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
A lot of agriculture’s environmental impact is due to fertilizer, especially nitrogen. Farmers want to minimize these impacts and the costs associated with this expensive product by only applying what the crop needs. The problem is, says Sound Agriculture CEO Adam Litle, that a lot of this fertilizer doesn’t make it into the crop.
Litle… “What's bad about bulk fertilizer is you're applying 200 pounds on average of nitrogen on a corn field to get 200 bushels of corn. And roughly 30% of that gets wasted, if not more. It volatilizes in the air as nitrous oxide, which is 300x more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas emission. 3% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from this nitrous oxide emission in production of bulk fertilizer.”
Sound Agriculture’s SOURCE product is a chemical, but used in very small doses it can stimulate the activity of naturally occurring nitrogen fixing microbes in the soil.
Litle… “We can replace an entire semi-truck of nitrogen with four gallons of our product. I think by and large, a lot of chemicals are bad, but very, very small amount of chemicals can do very important things for the world. It's much more about volume and impact than it is about this binary classification of chemistry versus biology.”
Learn more at Sound.ag.