Peak Phosphorous: Growing Enough Food For 9 Billion People In 2050
How supramolecular host chemistry could play a pivotal role in meeting our needs
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My wife and I get a biweekly community supported agriculture (CSA) box. Right now we are in deep winter so its mostly rutabega, celeriac, butternut squash, kale, radish, carrots, onions, and black radish. We started doing this in an attempt to support local farmers and to try and eat what is season. I sincerely hope that small scale local farms become more abundant. We both know that farming and how we get our food is important, but in doing some research on how we get our food and the challenges we face in the coming decades I think today’s topic is going to be critical to our society.
A Short Story About Phosphorous
Today, I am writing about fertilizer. I’ve written about the Haber-Bosch process before and it’s where we get the majority of our nitrogen based fertilizers, but there are also other nutrients and elements that are critical to getting our food to grow such as phosphorous and it is just as important. The problem is there is no Haber process that we can turn on that can convert air to phosphorous.
The problem of phosphorous being a finite nutrient is also compounded by the fact that in 2050 we will have about 2 billion more people on planet Earth and we will need to figure out a way to feed them all (if we wish to end world hunger that is). Jonathan Foley writing for National Geographic outlines a 5-step plan to try and accomplish this task of feeding 2 billion more people.1 In Step 2, Foley proposes we grow more food on our existing farmland and in Step 3 proposes we use resources more efficiently.
These two steps make me think of fertilizer. Putting fertilizer in fields has historically been a way to increase crop yields and goes back to when we used to raise animals next to fields. Manure, compost, and bones were the fertilizers of choice prior to the industrial revolution and urbanization of western society. After the industrial revolution chemists and engineers figured out how to make fertilizers such as ammonium salts, urea, phosphate salts, and potassium salts to name a few. Making these fertilizers at scale enabled distribution to farmers that specialized in just a few crops.
I think economies of scale have enabled some of the lowest food prices in decades, but our system is fragile. The fragility of our food system is no different than that of our oil refining network (as we have seen in Texas) or any modern supply chain. But if our food system fails it would be catastrophic.
The fragility of the fertilizers we use in production of our foods also goes back to phosphorous. Julia Rosen wrote an amazing article in The Atlantic recently about phosphorous, our history in how we have obtained it, and the problems we are going to be facing.2 Essentially, prior to the industrial revolution the whole compost and spreading of manure kept a good amount of phosphorous in the soil we used for farming, but with urbanization we started creating massive amounts of sewage that could no longer be put back into the soil. Rosen writes:
But for as long as scientists have understood the importance of phosphorus, people have worried about running out of it. These fears sparked the fertilizer races of the 19th century as well as a series of anxious reports in the 20th century, including one as early as 1939, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to assess the country’s phosphate resources so that “continuous and adequate supplies be insured.”
Rosen further expands on the phosphorous in quoting Karl Marx’s observation of severing ourselves from the phosphorous cycle, which has sundered any sort of circularity we might have in our society and turned it into a one way pipe that empties into the ocean. Isaac Asimov wrote in Life’s Bottleneck that “life can multiply until all phosphorous is gone, and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent,” which was curated at the beginning of an article by Said Darwish who further writes about phosphorous:3
Today, phosphate rock reserves underpin world food security and concerns over peak phosphate conjure up neo-Malthusian nightmares. Phosphorous is still bound up with colonialism in North Africa, where it limits life chemically and socially to make soils abroad more fertile. “We Want to Live” (nheb na’ish) was a 2013 grassroots campaign against pollution from phosphate refineries in Gabès. As a bold activist known as Gabès Girl explained to me, “The Gulf of Gabes was known for its wealth in fish. The seaside oasis is the only of its kind in the world. Now the only thing we’re known for is yellow air and a sea full of wastes.”
Wealthy societies have extracted resources in an effort to make human life better—an effort to alleviate the suffering in the world through capitalism. Human productivity has soared with life expectancy. Social security programs once meant to ease the transition from working life to death now need to sustain people for 20 or more years in retirement. We can develop a vaccine for a virus within a few months, some of us can work anywhere in the world, and we are attempting to democratize access to things that were once only available to the upper echelons of society. We have attempted to create a true meritocracy (which has it’s own set of issues), but we are closer than ever to ensuring that the conditions in which you are born do not always dictate your future. The price we have paid for these societal benefits are global climate change, resource scarcity, and pollution.
Our Current Fertilizer Situation
The European Union recognizes our global fertilizer situation (I think) and recent legislation passed in 2019 limits the use of some phosphate fertilizers in order to restrict cadmium an other toxic impurities. The new rule means that not all fertilizers in Europe are created equal and it will inevitably restrict some fertilizers from being imported and/or deployed. This should in turn eventually lead to small price increases. The law further incentivizes that more organic fertilizer be deployed.4
From the law:
Promoting increased use of recycled nutrients would further aid the development of the circular economy and allow a more resource-efficient general use of nutrients, while reducing Union dependency on nutrients from third countries. The scope of the harmonisation should therefore be extended in order to include recycled and organic materials.
The law further defines that organic fertilizers shall contain organic carbon that is solely derived from biological origin. An organic fertilizer may contain peat, leonardite, and lignite, but no other material which is fossilized or embedded in geological formations.5 What often happens in regulatory situations like this is that the EU will take the lead and then California will likely adopt something similar and then the rest of the United States will eventually harmonize. China may also take a leadership position here if they can.
I did some more digging and it appears that 2021 has started off with strong fertilizer demand according to The Western Producer for the United States. Nitrogen fertilizer prices depending on location are anywhere between $275-$430/ton with average price increases of $15-$25/ton in December.
Chris Mccullough reporting for The Western Producer:
John Coughlan, who is a member of the Irish Farmers Association’s inputs project team, said the rise in fertilizer will affect farm incomes across the board.
He said: “Cereal farms have the biggest exposure with fertilizer now accounting for 35 to 40 percent of the variable production costs, while it accounts for approximately 17 percent on dairy farms,” Coughlan said.
“Based on the five-year average yield, rising fertilizer costs will push up the cost of grain production on Index 1 soils by an estimated 3.50 to 4.00 euros per tonne ($4.31 to $4.92).”
Fertilizer prices across the world are rising because of increases in energy costs and fluctuating exchange rates and export-import taxes.
Phosphate demand right now is strong globally with most volume sold out through February and beyond and overall phosphate prices have risen by $40-$85/ton at the start of 2021.6 So right now, prices are climbing, but this is not the only problem.
Julia Rosen further expands in The Atlantic on the fact that we are flushing all of this precious phosphate into the ocean, which is in a sense pollution. We are flushing it through inefficient nutrient uptake by plants, the eventual nutrient runoff into a rivers and oceans. We then flush our phosphate into sewers and septic tanks. Too much phosphorous in the ocean can lead to extinction events and probably our own unless Elon Musk gets us to Mars and is able to find all of the nutrients we need there and also figures our how to activate methane (I know, it sounds easy).
Other Uses of Phosphates in Plastics and Polymers
Phosphates are also not only used for fertilizer, they are a key fire retardant used in polymeric foams, composites, plastics, and construction materials. With global bans on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) a significant portion of the fire protection industry has switched to phosphate variants such as triphenyl phosphate (TPP), triethyl phosphate (TEP), and tris(chloropropyl)phosphate (TCPP) to name a few.
Phosphate fire retardants are also under scrutiny because there are reports of them being bioaccumulative in humans.7 Increased desire for building fire safety post Grenfell Tower and widespread occurrence of wildfires could put further demand on rock phosphate and its derivative phosphoric acid to produce more fire retardant materials.
One solution here would be to develop new fire retardants that do not use halogens or phosphates, but that is a whole separate topic for a different Tuesday.
Some Solutions To Our Phosphate Problem
Green Houses, Hydroponics, and Vertical Farming
Vertical farms have gotten a lot of attention in recent years. They often promise creation of new jobs while also occupying former derelict industrial buildings and promising to bring healthy produce to food deserts. These types of operations hold a lot of promise, but they are going up against a very large and entrenched incumbent of traditional industrialized agriculture that have the issues I introduced above.
Urban or vertical farms essentially solve some of the phosphate going into the ocean problem because they can keep their nutrient systems under constant recycling. They also localized agriculture production and reduce the overall distance that produce might travel to get to a consumer. Some companies like Vertical Harvest also want to convert a portion of their building space in Westbrooke, Maine into affordable housing.8
There are even companies like Eden Green willing to do turnkey vertical farm construction for you if you have enough capital, some land, and the requisite permits.9 The one big issue that faces hydroponic and vertical farms is the fact that the cost per pound of their plants are higher than traditional farming despite reducing traveling distance.
Peter Tasgal writing for Agritecture talks about the differences in cost of the different farming techniques where conventional is the lowest cost at $0.65/lb, hydroponic is $2.33/lb and vertical is $3.07/lb.10
Peter does an excellent job of walking through how he calculated his costs and I recommend you read his article if you are really interested in understanding why hydroponic and vertical farms are more expensive per pound of plant than conventional. One thing that I think Peter’s analysis does not include are the externalized costs that modern industrial agriculture incur from a conservation of phosphate standpoint.
Further, conventional farming has quite a bit of automation built in due to companies like John Deere and New Holland that make combine harvesters for corn and cereal grains. And another issue to consider here is that traditional big agriculture may also be using undocumented immigrant labor when automation is not possible and that labor is often paid below minimum wage. A hydroponic or vertical farm operating in Brooklyn, New York needs to pay higher wages for their employees so that food can be grown in the city.
While conventional farming is good in that it keeps prices low I think that the costs are externalized elsewhere. Additionally there are the issues of federal farm subsidies, pesticides, and seed patent infringement litigation that I do not have time to get into now, but the big thing to take away from conventional farming is that nutrient runoff is a problem and one that could be solve this problem is hydroponic and vertical farming.
More Efficient Nutrient Uptake
To take us back to Foley in National Geographic he proposes we need to produce more food with the same or less resources and the primary way to achieve this is through efficiency. If we consider vertical and hydroponic farming to be viable options for keeping nutrient solutions from running off with rain water into rivers and oceans then they are providing clear environmental value despite the higher costs compared to traditional farming. Vertical farms when built into multistory structures can also supply more produce per acre of building footprint as well. One way to lower costs for hydroponic and vertical farming is to not need as many nutrients to grow the same amount of plants. This will become more important as certain nutrients become more scarce.
I recently got a chance to talk to David Coorts and Robert Geiger of BPS Agriculture because they recently launched a new product called Evofactor through their subsidiary Verano365. Their new product Evofactor is based on their charged silica technology called OpusMAX that forms supramolecular structures with nutrients when in water. When Evofactor is used in nutrient solutions for hydroponic farms it can either reduce the amount of nutrients needed or can help plants put on mass faster and makes the farms more efficient. Below is a portion of our conversation that I have edited and condensed:
Tony: Can you explain how the technology behind Evofactor works?
Robert Geiger: Imagine taking a balloon, rubbing it on your head and sticking it on a wall. We’re essentially doing this at the micron level. Our particle is about 475 nm and when we put it in solution with any active, we see this attractive force that will pull chemistries to it. The chemistry could be suspended or dissolved, but the chemistry gets pulled to the particle and eventually a unique supramolecular structure gets self-assembled.
We have a solution of these highly-concentrated molecules that are still dispersed and homogeneous that gets to a certain size depending on how much [Evofactor] we put in, but it stops growing before it gets too big and falls out of solution. You get these “hot pockets” of chemistry in the field and you get more chemistry per square micron.
Tony: There seems to be a lot of growth in green house and vertical farms lately. Do you guys see this as a growing market?
David Coorts: The vertical farms or controlled environment agriculture space using hydroponics is growing. I would say almost exponentially. We believe the annual CAGR is in the mid-teens on a year-over-year basis. Evofactor is a nutrient adjuvant that increases efficiency, reduces waste, and is targeted towards those applications where growers are utilizing a water soluble nutrient solution.
With Evofactor, we can produce an equal plant with less fertilizer; and with the same amount of fertilizer, we can produce a plant that is 30-50% bigger. We just completed a hydroponic trial with Rex Butterhead lettuce where we kept everything the same except where we added Evofactor and we got a 51% increase in leaf mass. At the end of the day, if we can produce more vegetation per square foot, that's really good for the grower.
On the flip side, you could produce the same amount with less fertilizer, which goes to the sustainability side. [Our] product development team did testing for 20-70% reduction in nutrients, and we feel comfortable saying 30-50% reduction in nutrients is possible depending on species and conditions. We can work with a grower to figure out the optimal conditions too.
Tony: Why do the Big Agriculture companies not have this technology or something similar?
David: Good question. It doesn’t mean that someday they won’t have it, if that makes sense. Part of our position is that with Verano365 is we are a creating an opportunity for direct product sales [to growers].
We are currently engaged with major manufacturers in all aspects of agriculture. This includes manufacturers involved with nutrients, pesticides, fertilizers, biostimulants, and adjuvants to name a few. Everyone is curious and interested in this technology.
Tony: Would you say you are the first ones to have this sort of technology hit the market?
Robert: We view this as a first-of-its-kind. Even though we are not nanotechnology the closest comparable is nanotechnology. Most nanotechnologies utilize pores or surface area to fill and transfer chemistry that gets released by some type of mechanism either chemical or mechanical. The biggest concern with nanotechnology, as the particle gets smaller the toxicity goes up. In [the] majority of cases [nanoparticles] are synthetically made. Our process is fully mechanical and utilizes natural occurring minerals and water.
Tony: Let’s say I’m a customer and I want to use Evofactor with my nutrient system. Do I need to register this supramolecular structure that is forming with the EPA?
David: Basically, you just buy Evofactor from the greenhouse supply store and apply it at our recommended rates, depending on what amounts of nutrients you want delivered to the plants and it's as simple as that. There are no regulatory requirements from the grower's perspective. It’s just a nutritional adjuvant, which by the way, is kind of a first of its kind. My regulatory consultants were like “I’m not sure that type of product currently exists.”
To put this in perspective, a pallet of Evofactor will replace 28,000 lbs. of water soluble fertilizer. Think about the space requirements, the logistics of trucking and storing the material, versus a few boxes of liquid where you are dosing a few milliliters per gallon
All-in we’d like to see a grower have a net savings of 25% when they use Evofactor if they are doing a fertilizer reduction.
On the flip side, if they are trying to utilize the same amount of fertilizer, they can potentially get to market sooner because they are putting on biomass faster. We have several prospective customers that are behind due to the weather. They would like to get plants to places like Lowes or Home Depot on time and they are looking for solutions to get their plant growth to be faster. We are excited to work with them to make that a reality.
OpusMAX (the technology behind Evofactor) is recognized by the EPA as an inert and so it basically is used as a formulant that is inert. The USDA regards it as “generally regarded as safe” (GRAS). It’s Annex V exempt. It’s also currently going through the organic materials review institute (OMRI) listing process right now, and we expect to hear from them this spring.
If anyone is interested in trying this out the Verano365 website is here
In Conclusion
The big takeaway I took from this conversation is that hydroponic and vertical farmers could theoretically save 25% on their costs. If we go back to Peter Tasgal’s numbers this product could in theory bring costs down for growers significantly. If we apply the an across the board 25% reduction in cost we get the following numbers:
Perhaps I misunderstood the 25% cost reduction and David meant 25% cost reduction in fertilizer. That would be a much lower reduction in cost, but if fertilizer prices keep rising in 2021 then maybe this is what a hydroponic or vertical farm would need to stay cost competitive with conventional farming.
This is definitely an area I will try to keep up with in the future. If we think about basic human needs for survival we come back to abundant food, shelter, fresh water, and clean air. If we do not have all of these basics then society changes rapidly for everyone. It is my fundamental belief that chemistry has an important role to play in helping meet these basic needs for survival for the growing global population and I hope to educate and communicate these ideas to you, my audience.
Thank you for reading. Talk to you Friday with the big stories in Oil and Gas,
Tony
The views here are my own and do not represent those of my employer nor should they be considered investment advice.
This is also all provided to you free of charge so pay me back by subscribing and/or sharing with your friends and coworkers who are chemically inclined. Have any strong opinions? Let me know in the comments or just reply to this email.
Humanity Is Flushing Away One of Life’s Essential Elements by Julia Rosen in The Atlantic
Challenging times for fertilizer use in European Union by Chris McCullough for The Western Producer
These Buildings Combine Affordable Housing and Vertical Farming by Adele Peters for Fast Company
The Competitive Economics of Local Vertical and Greenhouse Farming by Peter Tasgal for Agritecture
Great post. I learned a lot!
Trying to understand more about the supramolecular assembly, I came across a study conducted by Verano365 in Kale. For this system they observed about a 25% reduction in cost of fertilizer (unfortunately not overall).
https://verano365.com/evofactor
Do you think it’s possible to feed the growing human population with small local farms, as you suggest in the opening paragraph? I thought the land use and productivity of small farms would prohibit feeding all humans. Maybe that’s an outdated point of view... And the further development could make local vertical farms competitive.
We receive a CSA box as well and love it mostly because the taste is so much better than supermarket produce