agriculture nitrogen News
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Integrating animal and crop production can reduce nutrient leaching from agricultural fields
Nutrient leaching, the movement of plant nutrients from soil to water, can have negative effects on aquatic ecosystems due to eutrophication, which reduces the oxygen available in water, causing species and habitat loss. Ecological Recycling Agriculture (ERA), which is based on ecological principles and integrates crop production and animal husbandry, may limit this effect. This study ...
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Pivot Bio Elects Roger Underwood as Board of Directors Chairperson
Pivot Bio, agriculture’s leading nitrogen innovator, announced today that Roger Underwood, entrepreneur and ag tech investor, has been elected to the Pivot Bio Board of Directors as an independent director and Chairperson. Additionally, the company announces that Lisa Safarian is promoted to President & Chief Operating Officer, Evan Wittenberg joins as its first Chief People Officer, ...
By Pivot Bio
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Amid food price spike, Nobel laureate eyes fertilizer
One of the reasons food prices have risen sharply is the cost of fertilizer: Nearly 2 percent of the world's energy goes into fertilizer production, which is becoming ever more costly as fuel prices rise. For decades, chemists have sought less energy-intensive ways to produce ammonia, the main component of fertilizer. The task has proven difficult, however, and only a handful of researchers are ...
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Nitrogen Fertilizers And Environmental Problems
Nitrogen fertilizers enable farmers to achieve the high yields that drive modern agriculture. The use of nitrogen fertilizer will continue to increase substantially as global population and food requirements grow. International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) forecasts suggest that under current conditions nitrogen fertilizer applications will total nearly 100 million tons per year by ...
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A new tool to assess nitrogen and phosphorus flow in agriculture
MITERRA-EUROPE is a new tool that models the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus, among other key pollutants, used in agriculture across all 27 Member States at regional, country and EU-27 levels. It can be used to calculate the effects of different strategies to minimise excess pollution. Many regions in the EU-27 use more nitrogen and phosphorus in agriculture than is required. The main sources ...
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China launches rural pollution study
The Chinese government has pledged funds to carry out the country's first survey of pollution sources in rural areas, according to state media. Zhang Fengtong, a senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture, told a press conference that the central government has allocated 230m yuan (US$31m) to the survey, which is set to get underway next year. The research will focus on animal, crop and ...
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Soaring prices and climate change expose fertilisers as environmentally unsustainable
As oil and gas prices rise so does the price of artificial chemical fertilisers - the lynch-pin of industrial agriculture’s claims to be ‘efficient’. In the UK, the price of nitrogen fertiliser has doubled over the past year to around £330 per tonne. With oil currently at over $130 a barrel and with OPEC warning it could reach $200 by the end of the year, it has been suggested that fertilisers ...
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Nitrogen fertilizer works way into sea and destroys marine habitats - EC
Substantial increases in the flow of nitrogen into the sea have raised concerns about marine pollution. New research shows that commercial fishing is playing an important, but now declining, role in transferring this nitrogen back onto land. Enormous amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are applied to agricultural land to increase crop productivity. However, the use of such fertilisers can be damaging ...
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Improve crop yield by removing manure solids
Manure has long been used as a crop fertilizer, but the challenge of finding an efficient use of the nutrients found in manure is ever present. The ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus in manure is low in relation to the nutrient needs of most crops. Therefore, crops tend to be overloaded with manure to meet the nitrogen requirement of agricultural crops, but the excess phosphorus from the process can ...
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Arcadia Biosciences Takes Next Step to Enable Farmers to Receive Carbon Credits for Reduced Nitrogen Fertilizer Use
Arcadia Biosciences, Inc., an agricultural technology company focused on developing technologies and products that benefit the environment and human health, today announced that the company has submitted a carbon credit methodology to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The methodology would allow ...
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Plant strategies for optimising nitrate intake
The less nitrogen there is in the soil, the better plants are at using it. Researchers from INRA, CNRS and CIRAD, in cooperation with Czech colleagues, have recently shed light on the crucial role of a protein that enables plants to not only assess their environment but also activate the proper adaptive response based on the conditions. This research, published in the 2 March 2015 issue of Nature ...
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Household compost as good for soil as conventional fertilisers, say EU researchers
Since 2005, conventional disposal of organic waste has been prohibited in Sweden. Instead, this waste is incinerated or separated at source, processed (composted or anaerobically digested) and recycled as fertiliser on crop land. A new study has investigated the use of organic waste from different sources as a fertiliser and found that residue from biogas production is an effective fertiliser. ...
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Fertilizers – a growing threat to sea life
A rise in carbon emissions is not the only threat to the planet. Changes to the nitrogen cycle, caused in large part by the widespread use of fertilizers, are also damaging both water quality and aquatic life. These concerns are highlighted by Professor Grace Brush, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, in her historical review1 of landscape changes around Chesapeake Bay, a large ...
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The hidden environmental costs of meat production
The meat industry involves global trading of feed, live animals and processed meat. A new study suggests that environmental costs are not necessarily expressed in the price paid by the consumers benefiting from cheap meat, but as environmental damage further back up the supply chain. Global meat consumption has increased by 75 per cent in 20 years, with consumers becoming increasingly removed ...
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Agricultural ammonia emissions could be reduced without affecting crop yield
Ammonia released by nitrogen fertilisers in Spanish agriculture could be reduced by up to 82% with only a very minimal impact on crop yield, finds new research. This could be achieved by combining optimised management of manure with the use of non-urea synthetic fertilisers. Agriculture accounted for almost 94% of total European atmospheric emissions of ammonia in 2011. The main sources of these ...
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Straw residue helps keep nitrogen on the farm
Scientists are exploring ways to reduce non-point pollution from agriculture. A new study finds that using straw residue in conjunction with legume cover crops reduces leaching of nitrogen into waterways, but may lower economic return. Agriculture is the largest source of nitrogen non-point pollution to waterways in the United States, flowing into streams and rivers via erosion from farmlands, ...
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Fertilizer industry grows despite safety concerns
In years past, Brian Moody's efforts to bring economic development to his small Illinois town focused on modest projects: merging an old hardware store whose owner was retiring with another shop to preserve 30 jobs or pointing artists to a vacant downtown building. Now he has a bigger prospect. Cronus Chemicals wants to build a $1.2 billion plant on a nearby cornfield that would manufacture ...
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