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and thought about
The Earthly Origin of Commercial Materials
|Feeding our Food (page 2 of 3)|
|These bottles and
bottles and bags and bags of nitrogenous materials, that I was talking
about -- before I began discussing "soup or chemistry," and tomatoes --
that green plants can use, and that people have learned how to make --
starting with (1) nitrogen from the air, and (2) a material that is a source
of hydrogen, such as the methane of natural gas -- are sometimes called
fertilizers. They began being called chemical fertilizers because
practical knowledge of how to control chemical reactions is what enabled
people to produce them from nitrogen and methane. They may contain substances
that are chemically identical to substances that what are commonly called
fertilizers, may contain, and that natural soil may contain. By the
way, the term fertilizer,
which fundamentally means
stimulator, or pregnancy and birth stimulator,
is a misnomer
that remained stuck, even after it was realized that these materials served
green plants by being nutrients for the green plants, rather than by stimulating
reproduction of the green plants, or stimulating production, of the green
plants. I prefer to use the term industrially produced green-plant nutrients.
There are a number of kinds of industrially produced green-plant nutrients, but I am talking about industrial produced nitrogenous materials now. These were introduced into commerce in 1913, and they changed agriculture, and the human condition dramatically, and profoundly. Arguably, they changed the human condition as much, or more, than the communications revolution that started with the telegraph and telephone, or the transportation revolution that started with combustion-operated engines, steamships, railroads, and horseless carriages.
These nitrogenous materials can be industrially produced, and transported to soil, much more rapidly and economically than people have been able to supervise aerial nitrogen being converted into similar materials by the micro-organisms living in the soil, or in compost. Presently, a small percentage of human beings have control over the large-scale industrial processes that are used for (1) converting aerial nitrogen into huge amounts of inexpensive -- and concentrated, and thus light and inexpensive to transport -- ammoniacal nitrogen products, and (2) for converting these into urea, and into nitrate-nitrogen products.
Nitrate nitrogen becomes immediately available to metaphytes, as soon it dissolves in soil moisture. Metaphytes can easily convert into more and more material, in the form of edible metaphytes. Ammoniacal and urea nitrogen becomes rapidly transformed into nitrate nitrogen. Metaphytes need nitrogen, but cannot absorb the abundant molecular nitrogen of the air. They must have, generally, nitrate nitrogen, or may to some degree be able to use ammoniacial nitrogen directly, instead of waiting for soil micro-organisms to convert it into nitrate nitrogen.
How did all that nitrate nitrogen get into the soil, "to begin with?" Well, I'll describe that part of the circle for you, where aerial nitrogen gets into the soil, naturally, but you're right, I have no idea where the circle started. It's a circle, dammit -- maybe it doesn't starts nowheres! OK, maybe I'm trying to be cute here, and maybe I don't know myself how the circle "started," and maybe I know that serious researchers have investigated clues to billions of years of life on earth, and have created hypotheses as to how the the present biosphere, with its present nitrogen cycles, developed over time, and maybe I don't remember much about what I've read about these hypotheses. But in terms of windows of time consisting only of 1000's of years, as opposed to billions of years, the idea of a predictable, repeated circle of transformation of materials, each cycle having a length of only a few months or years, from an arbitrary origination point back to the same origination point, that doesn't change much from cycle to cycle, is relevant and useful.
The Haber Process, a mutation of the behavior of a single species, us -- along with a global population explosion of this species -- began altering nitrogen cycles in a big way. The Haber Process is a departure from the old ways of soil microbes, in regard to how aerial molecular nitrogen may be converted to soil nitrogen.
Old ways and new
In 1900, mined Chilean nitrate came into use, on a large scale, as a soil amendment. But Chilean nitrate was mined (in Chile); it wasn't manufactured. After 1913, Chilean nitrate was not needed much anymore; industrially produced nitrogen-containing substances became much cheaper.
Handy Cost Comparator
Of course, the nitrogen bound up in the organic matter of compost leaches out of topsoil, into lower layers of soil, where it is useless for agriculture, at a slower rate than the nitrogen of urea granules, that dissolve in the soil, leaches out.
Other "natural" components of the nitrogen circle
What happens to the ammoniacal nitrogen that decay organisms construct, our of cellular nitrogen? Some kinds of nitrifying bacteria convert the ammoniacal nitrogen into nitrite nitrogen; then other kinds of nitrifying bacteria convert this nitrite nitrogen into nitrate nitrogen.
So circularly far
Return to Introduction to Circles
Green Plants in the Circle
Legumes grab up nitrogen fast -- directly from nitrogen-fixing organisms.
People grab up legumes fast
Where does our human cellular nitrogen come from?
Before 1900, we relied on micro-organisms to put aerial nitrogen into the soil. Between 1900 and 1913, Chilean nitrate was mined, and added to soil. Beginning in 1913, people began fixing aerial nitrogen themselves, using the "Haber Process," as described above: combining aerial nitrogen, and hydrogen, in the presence of osmium, at high pressure, to form ammonia.
What's the world population today, about 6 billion? In 1900 the world population was about 1.5 billion. Much of the material of that 4.5 billion new people can be traced to Haber-Process fixed-nitrogen, not naturally fixed-nitrogen.
Cyanophytes fix nitrogen naturally, at lower temperature and
pressure, without osmium, do not require huge factories, and are handy
in other ways too
Other bacteria that fix nitrogen
"The different forms of biological nitrogen fixation enable rice to yield one or two tons of grain per hectare without supplementary mineral [industrially produced] fertilizer. This is on of the reason Asian farmers have harvested from one to two tons of rice per hectare for centuries without applying such fertilizers"Why do we need nitrogen; where in us goes the nitrogen we "eat"? Nitrogen is necessary to construct amino acids and proteins, and nucleotides and nucleic acids.
Much of the substance of us is proteins, which are polymers of amino acids, and each amino acid molecule contains at least at least 1 nitrogen atom. Our nitrogen requirements, which are supplied by proteins or amino acids that we eat, which green plants make from (inorganic) nitrates and ammoniacal nitrogen they find in soil, which get into the soil from the air via soil micro-organisms, or via human industry, are rather high. And nitrogen tends to be a limiting factor in how much of any (protein-containing) food-plant one can grow on any area of land.
Amino acids are necessary what we construct our proteins out of: proteins are chains, strings -- polymers -- of amino acids. Proteins form the substance of much of our muscles, much of our skin, much of our soft tissues, most of our hair, most of our nails, and all enzymes -- which we need to control the size and speed of our on-going chemical reactions, our life-processes -- are proteins. Therefore our tissues that aren't proteins, nevertheless required proteins, in order to regulate their production.
And our proteins required nucleic acids as a "template" for their production.
Nucleotides are necessary to construct our nucleic acids -- nucleic acids are strings, polymers, of nucleodtides. You might say that nucleic acids are the substance that our "data-and-program files," our "plans," or "templates" (for our proteins) are made out of, a little bit like paper and ink are the substance that an architect's plans (for a building) are made out of. But this is an oversimplification; it is not a precise metaphor. Although we are composed of many different kinds of (often distinctively) different cells, nearly every single cell of a human being has, at least during part of the life of the cell -- and most cells have throughout their life -- a full set of plans for the entire human, as opposed to a set of plans for the distinctive cell the plans are housed in.
Relatively recently, biologists have been figuring out how particular program and data subsets, in the complete program and data set, are implemented in any particular cell, at any particular time, and how other subsets aren't.
During the growth, development, and maintenance of a human being, each mitotic cell division causes this entire set of plans to be duplicated. Duplication of the cell requires nitrogen for its nucleic acids, and nitrogen for its protein.
Nucleic acid are needed in cells not only to store genetic information, but a different set of nucleic acids is also needed to transmit information from the genetic storage area in the nucleus, to the construction and operating areas of the cytoplasm. Other nucleic acids residing in the cytoplasm, or in cell organelles, manage various cell operational activities.
Nucleic acids in cells store information regarding the immune responses that cells have learned, and can execute in response to different pathogens. Nucleic acids in the brain have a storage function in regard to new mental operations we have "learned," or things we have "remembered." Cerebral learning and memory are handy to have, in addition to the basic general growth and development and regeneration operating plans that we inherited from ancestors. So nucleic acids store individual human memory, such as immune response memory, and conscious memory -- as well as genetic "memory," the "memory" of how to construct an individual human being that is passed on from parent to offspring.
So we need nitrogen for nucleic acid construction, as well as for protein construction, but I don't know the relative amount of nitrogen that is used for one or the other. What I do know, is that nitrogen is a key element of our substance, our matter. We need plenty of it; its availability to plants, in soil, is key to determining how much of any plant will grow in soil; its availability to humans, in proteins, in plants, is key to determining how many human will grow in the earth's biosphere. Plus the availability of food plants, in general, is key in determining how many humans will grow in the earth's biosphere.
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