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A comment on Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to an economic disaster. Parent comment

Re:Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to ... by wyager on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:03AM (#28444993)
True, but presumably there exist (possibly not-yet-invented) high-yield farming practices which fix atmospheric nitrogen without the need for fertilizer. There’s just not been any economic pressure to use or invent such a practice, since presumably it would be less efficient than using fertilizer. Phosphorous you can’t get out of the atmosphere so we might not have an easy out there.
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Re:Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to ... by marcosdumay on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:16AM (#28445145)
Yes, there is, you rotate your crop with legumes. There are also crops that gather stable phosphorous and activates it, but those tend to be long-lived and thus bad for rotation.

What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.

1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to ... by wyager on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @11:09AM (#28445801)
I assume the focus is on ensuring long-term crop viability even if we manage to deplete easily accessible mineral deposits used to provide phosphates or whatever. Personally I say we liberate everything we can from the ground, including carbon.

How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?

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Re:Sri Lanka’s overnight flip to organic farming has led to ... by tastyfreeze on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @12:36PM (#28446795)
Phosphorous is released from minerals by fungus in healthy soil. Tilling and chemical amendments, NPK fertilizers and biocides, kill fungus first.

If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.

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