In module 5.2, we present a basic account of nutrient cycling and nutrient management in food production systems. When we talk about nutrients in this context, we are referring to the nutrients that are needed to grow crops which are taken up from soils by the roots of crop plants. These include the important nutrients nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) which will form the focus of this module. We refer to N and P as "important" nutrients because they are needed in large quantities, relative to the amounts that are readily available in many soils. In agricultural and ecological terms, we say that crops and food production are especially responsive to N and P abundance: a shortage of N or P causes dramatic declines in production of food, while sufficiency and abundance will raise yields so that N and P supply have been a focus of human management to maintain food production. We will begin by talking about the way that N and P move around in cycles in all ecosystems, including the agroecosystems that are managed by humans to produce food. Human management systems in agriculture thus play a major role in altering the cycles of these nutrients in order to maintain, and in some cases increase the production and supply of food from farmland (farmed soils). This management can also negatively impact water quality in watersheds, as you saw in module four. We will also understand the way that soil organic matter (SOM) relates to these two major nutrients and soil productivity, as well as the general concept of soil depletion and soil regeneration as these relate to strategies of soil management in food production.
In module four, and in your education previous to this course, you've learned about the water cycle, in which water evaporates from bodies of water, condenses into clouds, and then is returned as rain to drain again into groundwater, lakes, and oceans. Each of the major crop nutrients, and most chemical elements on the earth's surface, has a similar cycle in which the nutrient is transported and transformed from one place to another, spending time in different 'pools', analogous to the division of water into lakes, rivers, clouds, rain, and the ocean. Just as rainwater and groundwater may be of more immediate use to crop plants than the ocean, different pools of the same nutrient differ in availability to plants. For example, most soils hold a tremendous amount of nitrogen in large organic molecules, but only the smaller soluble pool, and some smaller molecular forms of N, are directly available to plants. The way that soil nutrients move through the earth system, including within food production systems, is called nutrient cycling. The objective of this module is for you to understand the main features of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) cycling in human-managed soils. Earth scientists sometimes use the term "biogeochemical cycling" to emphasize that each nutrient’s cycle represents the geological and atmospheric sources of the nutrients, the biology of organisms that often transform nutrients from one form to another, and the chemical nature and interactions of each element.
As an example of biogeochemical cycling, think of the important element carbon (C). Carbon has a chemical nature that allows it to be a fundamental molecular building block for all living things. In addition, there is an impressive atmospheric pool (a sort of geologic pool) of non-organic carbon dioxide. Interacting with this atmospheric pool, green plants and algae play a fundamental role in turning atmospheric CO2 into biological organic carbon in living things and the remains of living things, such as plants, that fall back into the soil. Scientists refer to this large set of interacting parts with geological, biological, and chemical attributes, earth's system that "processes" and recycles carbon in a certain sense, as the biogeochemical C cycle. Another example is phosphorus (P), which will be described in more detail on the following pages: The earth’s crust is the primary source of all P, which is then weathered by geological and biological processes and also in human fertilizer factories, held or retained strongly by soil clay minerals after application by farmers, and eventually occupies a key role in every living thing as one of the elements within the DNA molecules encoding our genes. It’s essential to realize that humanity and human systems are now major players within these nutrient cycles including C, P, and nitrogen. We can see this in activities such as mining (and eventually threatened depletion) of phosphorus sources for fertilizers or fixing of large amounts of nitrogen for fertilizers with a massive expenditure of energy and emission of carbon dioxide through the use of oil and gas.
The proper management of soil nutrients in soils for human food production boils down to a simple requirement: the need to replace nutrients that are "subtracted" from soil during production. These subtractions occur as nutrients are taken up by crops from the soil and then exported as food products in crops and livestock. Nutrients can also be lost to soil erosion and in dissolved forms, by drainage of water from the soil (called leaching). The goal of incorporating manure, plant material, and chemical fertilizers by farmers is to add back these subtracted nutrients. In the case of soil erosion, the idea is to avoid such losses completely by protecting soils. Human-managed fields and farms can be compared to nutrient bank accounts, where withdrawals must be balanced by deposits, and where it is better to have a substantial balance than a minuscule balance. Natural systems like forests or prairies lose some nutrients as does a farm field, but to a comparatively minor degree (fig 5.2.1 below). The need for humans to replenish nutrients is much greater in any managed system like a crop field or pasture than in unmanaged forests or grasslands. This is especially true in intensive production systems of crops or animal forages, for example, the corn, vegetable, and hay fields and pastured rangelands that are typical in agriculture of the United States and around the world. In systems where soils are tilled to grow annual crops on hillsides, the combined exported nutrients in food and those lost to erosion can quickly rob a soil of most of its nutrients. Protecting a soil from these losses, and regenerating the nutrients lost by adding crop residues (straw, cornstalks, other stems, and roots), manure, and fertilizer materials (ash, phosphate rock, bone, chemical fertilizers) are therefore important strategies used by food producers to sustain production. We’ll devote more focus to the important role of crop species, crop rotations, tillage, and soil erosion as part of agroecosystems in modules 6 and 7. For now, we want to understand the basics of these principles of soil regeneration.
In addition to individual nutrients like N, P, potassium (K) and calcium, an overarching aspect of soil depletion and regeneration by human food producers is the important role played by soil organic matter (SOM) and the potential to either to deplete or sustain organic matter in soils (recall figure 5.1.1 and the fact that organic material is one of the key solid components of soil). In particular, concerns about soil organic matter (SOM) center on the large amounts of organic carbon in large molecules of SOM. This soil organic carbon (SOC) both feeds microbes in soil, allowing them to perform nutrient cycling functions and also contributes positively to soil properties. SOC is not a plant nutrient that comes from soil. In fact, it actually comes originally from the atmosphere in the form of plant remains that contain carbon fixed by plants (roots, leaves, manure, rotting wood, etc.) and accompanies N, P, and other nutrients that were in the plants. SOC within soil organic matter plays so many important roles in soil function and soil fertility that it should be considered a “master variable” explaining soil productivity, along with soil pH, soil depth, and soil drainage. Among its other functions, SOM promotes soil storage of crop-available water, is a major food source for soil microbes that perform beneficial roles in soil, and fosters the availability of many nutrients by holding them in moderately available form or decomposing to release them in soils. In addition, by far the largest pool of nitrogen in soils is held in N atoms within many types and sizes of soil organic molecules, and also within the bodies of soil microbes.
In many food production systems where the soil is plowed (also called tilling or tillage), SOM is in fact depleted by oxidation (a “slow burn”, like iron rusting) when soils are broken apart by plows, hoes, and other implements. Therefore, an important part of soil regeneration by human food production systems is not just replacing nutrients in a pure chemical form like fertilizers, but also maintaining overall soil function with soil organic matter. Therefore, in most parts of the world farmers have developed ways of reincorporating the roots and stems of plants (crop residues) as well as manure made by animals from the forage crops fed to them. These sources of plant carbon sustain SOM over the long term and feed microbes. These ways of sustaining the nutrients and organic matter of soils are depicted with a coupled human-natural systems diagram below (Fig 5.2.2) as a type of feedback loop in which human systems respond to soil degradation by incorporating organic matter like residues, compost, and manure.
The following brief reading assignment further illustrates the important functions of organic matter.
Building Soils for Better Crops, pages 9-17 in Chapter 2: Organic Matter: What It Is and Why It’s So Important. [1] (Free e-book as downloadable PDF). This chapter and book will be used in modules 7 and 9.
The following exercise asks you to use graphical data based on real soils to make conclusions about the important role of SOM in the water-holding capacity of soils. Along with the materials in module 4 on water and food production, and the systems approach to soil management in module 7, these concepts should help you to appreciate the role of SOM in fostering the environmentally sustainable production of food, as well as resilient systems (see module 10) that can deal with drought stress.
Examine Fig. 5.2.2, which draws on about sixty soils analyzed in a publication that related the water-holding capacity of soils to their organic matter content. The graph summarizes that data as the height of three columns on a bar graph. The height represents the amount of water stored in each soil, imagined as a depth of water in mm covering the soil at its surface (this is also how irrigation managers imagine applying water to soils, as the mm of rainfall they have replaced with irrigation). Each column represents a type of soil, from a coarse-textured sand on the left to a "heavy" or clayey soil on the right. The stacked colors on the graph represent the way that organic matter is able to improve the water-holding capacity of soils. Answer the following questions.
Nitrogen (N) is one of the most important nutrients for plant growth and crop production, along with phosphorus (P) considered on the next page. Nitrogen is important because it is used by plants to create proteins, which include the enzymes and building blocks of their photosynthetic "machinery". In fact, nitrogen in some ways underlies the green color of plants and vegetated areas on the earth's surface, because of the green, N-containing chlorophyll proteins (enzymes) used in photosynthesis (see module 4), which along with the other photosynthetic enzymes is one of the major uses of nitrogen within plants. These plant proteins become animals protein when plants are fed to livestock, or when we eat plants. The ubiquitous nature of nitrogen for the protein needs of the earth's biosphere explains why N is such an important nutrient for plant growth. Nitrogen is, therefore, a key element in the entire food system and interacts very strongly with human management. One indication of nitrogen's importance to the food system is that humans currently expend more energy on creating N fertilizers for food production by taking N2 out of the atmosphere in fertilizer factories (Fig. 5.2.3) than is spent on any other nutrient.
This module focuses on the subject of nutrient cycling, and below in figure 5.2.3, we present a basic diagram of the nitrogen cycle. Your initial impression of the diagram may be its relative complexity compared to the water cycle, for instance. This is true: the N cycle is complex, starting with the fact that it involves gas, solid, and liquid forms: gaseous N in the atmosphere, solid forms of N in soils and plants, and N dissolved in water in the soil and in earth's waterways (you may remember the problem of N pollution in waterways from module 4). To simplify this and take away the key concepts which should be your goal in this module (entire courses can be taught on the N cycle), we will present the basic pathway of N from the atmosphere into plants, soils, and water, which will complement the caption for the N cycling diagram below. Please refer to Figure 5.2.3 throughout this description. First, N exists in an enormous reserve as 78% of the earth's atmosphere (top left of Fig. 5.2.3). Creating usable forms of nitrogen requires that this N2 gas is "fixed" in the same way that plants fix carbon into their carbonaceous stems and leaves. Legume plants like beans, peas, and alfalfa host bacteria in their roots in nodules that are able to fix N2 gas (more on legumes as an important crop family in module 6). Nitrogen then moves directly into legume plants' tissues as proteins. In parallel to this biological fixation of N, humans have designed industrial methods to fix N in factories, using energy from petroleum and natural gas, and creating soluble nitrogen chemicals that are applied to soil, where they dissolve in soil water to become part of the pool of soil soluble N that is available to plants. This pool of soluble N (light green oval within the soil N pool below) is also called inorganic N to contrast it from organic N in proteins, crop residues, and soil organic matter. Inorganic N taken up by plants, plus the N fixed by legumes, is then used to grow crops and eventually produce crop- and livestock-based food products. Meanwhile, organic "waste" products from growing crops like straw, cornstalks, and roots, plus animal manures which are undigested plants, are not "waste" at all but are a hugely important organic source of N and other nutrients that are recycled to soil (brown arrows in Fig. 5.2.3). These organic soil inputs applied by farmers help to maintain soil organic matter (SOM; see previous pages and the assigned reading on soil organic matter) including the largest pool of soil N within SOM and soil microbes. Soil organic matter can be decomposed by microbes, liberating additional amounts of N to the inorganic N pool. µbes also can take up soil inorganic N, reversing the effects of SOM decomposition.
So far the N cycle may appear a relatively neat and ingenious system (albeit quite complex!). However, it is important to highlight the ways that it can become problematic under human management, indicated by the red "loss" arrows in Fig. 5.2.3. First, when the soluble N pool in soil is large, for example after fertilizer or manure is applied, and abundant water moves through the soil, like during a rain event, excessive soil N can move into waterways causing pollution and coastal dead zones (this is covered in some detail in module four, and again in this module's summative assessment). This process is called leaching of soil soluble N. Second, when erosion occurs, soils can also lose large amounts of their N "bank account" through erosion, because solid organic matter particles are rapidly eroded from soils in hilly areas when soil is not protected by plant cover or stabilized by plant roots. Lastly, soils can lose nitrogen back to the atmosphere through the processes of gaseous loss, where dissolved nitrogen becomes N-containing gases that diffuse back to the atmosphere. If you have ever caught a whiff of ammonia from a bottle of ammonia cleaning solution (dissolved ammonium that becomes ammonia gas) you know how N can move from a solution like that in a wet soil into the air. The most serious of these gas loss pathways is nitrous oxide (N2O) which is of concern because it is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.
All of these loss pathways create the impetus for farmers and the food systems that support them, to manage nitrogen in an efficient and non-polluting way. The idea that highly productive farming systems with annual crops, manures, and fertilizers can completely eliminate N losses is actually quite challenging. This is because the N cycle has so many participants (humans, plants, microbes, livestock) interacting in complex ways (note: a complex system!), and because nitrogen is inherently "flighty" and "leaky", never staying put and always in transformation, with some forms so easily lost from soils to rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere. Nevertheless, there is much room for improvement that can also serve to save money and energy for food producers, and avoid the pollution costs to downstream ecosystems and food producers (for example, fishing communities affected by dead zones, see module 4). Two of these are (1) increasing the efficiency of timing and amounts of N fertilizer and manures to better match only what is needed by crops and (2) including crops and other plant components on farms that help to recycle soluble N from deeper in the soil and in downslope areas before it reaches waterways. Both of these strategies are addressed in the following modules on crops and systems approaches to soil management (modules 6 and 7). In addition, if N is not replenished in soils after it is exported as food products or suffers these losses, crops can face N insufficiency, which is a major issue for poorer farmers around the world. The summative assessment for this module focuses on these twin issues of nutrient deficiency and excess.
In an analogous way to the nitrogen (N) cycle on the previous page, we will present the basics of the phosphorus (P) cycle related to food production (refer to figure 5.2.4 below in this section) You'll note that the P cycle is a good deal simpler than the N cycle. For example, there is no gaseous form of P as there is for N, so the atmosphere does not participate in the P cycle. Also, leaching of soluble P is not a major issue as it is for soluble soil N. To begin the description of the P cycle, the large reserve of "primary" P that is accessed by plants and fertilizer production for agriculture is not the atmosphere (as it is for N), but rather so-called phosphate rocks (or rock phosphate) in the crust of the earth, which are mined like other minerals. These rocks are ground up and treated in fertilizer factories to make the phosphate (PO4-) in them water-soluble so that phosphate can be directly taken up by plants from the small pool of soluble phosphorus in soils. In addition to this industrial process that supplies P to plant roots, there are small amounts of soluble P that are continually released by weathering (see Module 5.1) of grains of rock phosphate that form a small part of most soils. These plant-available forms of P from fertilizers and weathering are taken up by plants and pass into the food system when crops are harvested for food products or are fed to livestock. Just as for N (figure 5.2.3), crop residues and manures with organic P are recycled to the soil and are an essential way of replenishing soil organic P supplies. Also, decomposition of soil organic P that liberates soluble P, and uptake of P into the bodies of microbes, link the organic P pool in soil organic matter (SOM) with the small amount of soluble P in soils.
One difference between the cycling of P vs. N in soils is the fact that most soils have ways of chemically capturing and holding soluble P in forms that can become very unavailable to plants. The clay mineral fraction of soils is especially active in retaining P, especially so for the clays that occur in tropical soils (you may be familiar with rusty or yellow-colored clays, made from iron oxides, in warmer areas of the United States and the world). This is called soil retention or fixation of P. In a soil that retains P strongly, less than five percent of the P in applied fertilizer, which enters in a soluble form very suited for plant uptake, is ever available for crops. The rest is quickly locked away by reactions with soil clay minerals. Soil scientists call this process P fixation or P retention, and a global map of estimated P retention has been made (Figure 5.2.5) that summarizes how phosphorus can become limiting to food production, which is a serious problem in many tropical soils. One comparison that may be helpful in remembering the way that soil locks away phosphorus is to contrast it to the behavior of soil N. While soil N is "flighty" or "leaky" with multiple forms and loss pathways, soil P tends to be the "clingy" opposite of soil N -- the issue is not that it is held too loosely in soils but rather that it is held too tightly.
To address the challenge of retained P, farmers may resort to continually supplying fertilizers and manures to crops, often in quantities that greatly exceed crop demand. Nevertheless, additions of organic matter also tend to make retained or fixed P more available, combined with the use of crop species that can better take up fixed forms of P, so that P is moved from the retained, unavailable fraction of P to organic forms in crop and microbial biomass that are eventually recycled into available soluble forms. Certain plant-symbiotic soil microbes, especially mycorrhizal fungi, are particularly efficient at helping plants to access these less soluble forms of soil P. In addition to these soil management measures, first farmers, and now formal plant breeders have developed crop varieties that are more efficient in taking up some of retained P that is locked away in soil.
As can be seen in Fig. 5.2.4, erosion of particles of soil that contain organic and retained P is the major pathway of phosphorus loss from soils (red arrow in Fig. 5.2.4), in contrast to P export for useful purposes in crop- and livestock-based foods. Along with maintaining the availability of soil P with regard to P retention, protecting soils against erosion is an excellent way to protect the ability of soils to supply P for food production. This main message will be taken up in the summative assessment for this module, and again in Module 7.
One of the important factors in deciding how much P must be added to soils to replenish them is the amount of P that is exported by typical crops and food products. This exercise will guide you in calculating the amounts of P that leave farm fields on a per area basis, and also at the level of a "phosphorus use footprint" for typical products, analogous to a water footprint in module 4. Consider the table below which reports the use of P to produce unit quantities of a few representative foods. The first column (A) reports very approximately how much a single hectare of soil (100 by 100 m area, about 2.5 acres) will support. The second column (B) is the content or concentration of phosphorus in the food, which means that multiplying A x B gives the kg P exported from the soil by the crop or animal product, which is shown in C. Columns D and E take a slightly different approach: in D the amount of the product eaten by an average U.S. person is reported. In column E, that per-person amount is turned into a per-person consumption of phosphorus in grams (per year)
Food crops |
(A) kg of fresh product or animal weight sustained per hectare (100 m x 100 m) |
(B) Phosphorus content of the fresh food (g P/ kg fresh wt.) | (C) kg P exported from soil, per Ha (100 m x 100 m) | (D) Per person consumption of product in the U.S. (kg per person per year) | (E) Per capita consumption of soil P resources (g P per person per year) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
carrots | 10000 | 0.35 | 3.5 | 3.2 | 1.1 |
wheat | 3500 | 7.6 | 27 | 61 | 464 |
beef | 250a | 7 | 1.8 | 50 | 350 |
milk | 10000b | 3.6 | 36 | 20 | 72 |
Table assembled by the author from publically available data on typical yields and nutrient content of agricultural products. For example for yield data see National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the USDA [2] for crop nutrient content see National Resource Conservation Service's Crop Nutrient Database [3]. For nutrient values of foods such as beef and milk see the USDA food composition database [4].
aAbout the equivalent weight of half a beef cow/steer
bVery roughly a single production cycle (about 12 months) in liters for a single, lactating cow of a high-production variety
Both N and P are distinctive in possessing extremes of surplus and shortages across the variety of food production systems around the globe. For poorer small-scale farmers, who number more than two billion globally, the means to effectively replenish the nutrients exported by crops, or detain the nutrients removed by erosion on sloping land can be beyond the reach of their financial means or labor power, or simply not sufficiently part of their knowledge systems. Deficits of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils ensue, complicated by soils that may have a high degree of P retention, and low organic matter levels that decrease the overall soil quality by retaining less water and crusting easily, aspects that will be emphasized in the following modules. Applying the "bank account" analogy of soil nutrients introduced at the beginning of this module, after constant withdrawals the "soil bank account" begins to run such a low balance that overall functioning of soil productivity, and with it the livelihood of a smallholder household, are impaired. This can lead to a downward spiral of soil productivity (see the assigned reading for this module) that links issues of environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
Another feature of human-natural interactions for soil nutrients is the aspect of surplus exhibited by a "leaky" or "flighty" nutrient like nitrogen. This has been compounded by the development of the large-scale human capacity to add surplus nutrients to farm fields for food production. It's important to realize that prior to N fertilizers, bacterial nodules on the roots of legume crops (see Fig. 5.2.3 and the coverage of legumes in module 6) were the major way that N entered soils from the atmosphere, including the soils used for food production. Farmers before about 1900 relied exclusively on legume crops, as well as animal (and human!) manures derived from legumes and other crops as the principal way of regenerating the nitrogen in soil organic matter. These materials incorporated to soils decompose and release N that was used by crops. Since 1913, when N fertilizer production from the atmosphere was developed as a factory process, humanity has deployed greater and greater amounts of fossil fuel energy to fix greater and greater amounts of atmospheric N2 into soluble forms to feed crops. A startling fact is that humans now fix more atmospheric nitrogen than do legumes. This has buoyed the overall productivity of human food systems beyond what might have occurred without such fertilizers and is credited by many with avoiding widespread hunger (or dramatically expanding the population carrying capacity of earth’s human-natural systems, depending slightly on the perspective that is taken).
As has been noted in module 4, there have been unforeseen consequences of this trend towards greater fertilizer use that have become more evident in recent years. First, the share of CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer production has become a primary contributor to the overall impact of agriculture on global warming. Another is that fertilizers, in combination with a profit-minded vision of soil fertility that did not incorporate a view of the whole human-environment system, bred a highly “chemical” vision of soils that neglected the important role of soil organic matter and the physical and biological qualities of soil. This resulted in unforeseen negative impacts as farmers over-applied nutrients at a local scale to guarantee the highest yields possible, thereby polluting watersheds, and allowing farmers to lose sight of the important role of soil organic matter outlined in this module. In a more subtle way, there has been an increasing focus in plant breeding and globalized seed systems on varieties that respond well to soluble fertilizers, which many argue have favored the expansion of more industrial modes of food production to the financial detriment of smaller and more sustainable food producers. If you recall the narration of agricultural history in module 2, you will recognize that this is an example of niche construction, in which a modern, chemical-intensive niche has been created for specially bred modern varieties along with fertilizers and other chemical inputs. Nevertheless, many of these problems associated with an exclusive reliance on nitrogen fertilizers and chemical fertilizers are now recognized by researchers and policymakers. Current approaches to soil the world over have placed renewed emphasis on the importance of organic matter and a more economical use of nitrogen fertilizers.
In the summative evaluation for this module, you will explore these “surplus and shortage” issues of sustainability for Nitrogen and Phosphorus, which are emblematic of present-day and future sustainability challenges in the area of nutrients cycling.