The Phosphorus Problem
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
There is no getting around it - crops need nutrients to grow and if you’re going to pull out those nutrients in the harvest, you’re going to have to replace them somehow. For this reason, feeding eight billion people would not be possible without fertilizer. But one of our key crop nutrients, phosphorus, cannot be manufactured like nitrogen - it can only be mined. Phospholutions founder Hunter Swisher says this is why solving the phosphorus problem is so critical.
Swisher… “Globally, it's a finite resource, something that we mine in only a few select geographies around the world. And we're using this at a pretty alarming rate. It's a non-renewable resource. It's the second largest nutrient needed for food production, and we're basically dumping it into the bottom of the ocean. This was something I got pretty passionate about pretty early, and had the opportunity to think about how we solve this through technology. And for us to start, it's trying to tackle fertilizer efficiency. So 90 plus percent of what's pulled outta these mines gets applied to the farm field in some form and fashion of very inefficient sources of conventional commodity phosphate. But only 10% of it gets into the crop.”
The reason for this inefficiency is because of how phosphate interacts with the soil.
Swisher… “Phosphate is an extremely reactive nutrient. Something that likes to grab on and hold onto the soil pretty tightly, and that soil doesn't do a very efficient job at releasing it throughout the growing season. So what we do is we try to get more of what's applied actually into the crop by preventing it from being tied up in the soil.”
That’s Hunter Swisher of Phospholutions.
