Is Chemical Fertilizer Good For Your Garden?Garden gnomes don’t use much chemical fertilizer. It costs money, which we don’t have, and it might cause quite a stir at the garden center if one of us showed up to get some. But it has been a great blessing to you human folks. Anciently, before your kind understood soil science or the plant nutrients that are needed to grow crops, it was customary to clear land, burn the slash and farm for a few years until the soil was no longer productive. Then man would clear more land and repeat the process. Soil depletion occurs as crops, and the nutrients that they have taken up from the soil, are removed from the land to feed people or animals. If the nutrients are not replaced, the soil quickly becomes infertile. In the early 1700’s, crop rotation and cover cropping were discovered as effective soil building techniques. In the early 1800’s manures, rock powders and other natural amendments came into use to further improve the soil and replace lost nutrients. These were the first fertilizers. By the mid 1800’s a few agriculturists began discovering that chemically treating these amendments could make the ingredients more potent and more quickly usable by the crops they were growing. Today, more than half the crops grown worldwide are supplemented by the use of chemical fertilizers. The world is better fed and there is less hunger as a result. Nevertheless, there is a downside to the use of synthetics, but first, where do these inorganic plant foods come from? Many are actually organic amendments that are chemically treated to make the nutrient elements more readily accessible to plants. Rock phosphate treated with sulfuric acid produces super phosphate. Treating ammonia with sulfuric acid produces nitrogen rich ammonium sulfate, and a similar process can produce potassium sulfate. Because acids are often used in the process, these synthetics usually lower the soil pH , requiring the use of agricultural lime to bring the soil back to neutral. Other chemical processes are now used to produce fertilizer from completely synthetic sources. Natural gas is converted to ammonia, which is then used to produce nitrogen fertilizers. The Haber process is a method of ammonia synthesis that extracts nitrogen directly from the air. Many fertilizers are a result of finding a use for waste left from manufacturing other products unrelated to agriculture. All of this science is a blessing that has made fertilizer affordable and available to both farmers and gardeners. They are, for the most part, not harmful to the planet or to the crops that they produce. But here are some cautions:
So why use synthetics at all? Farmers use them as a cost effective (saves both money and labor) method of growing profitable crops on poor or marginal land. On better land, good farmers find that organic fertilizer programs and principles produce better long-term results. As a gardener, you will get the best and most cost effective results from organic methods, as well. But organic gardening is more labor intensive. If you are a senior or have physical limitations, chemical fertilizers can help you grow an abundant harvest of fresh fruits and vegetables at home. Happy gardening, Geefrank
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