White Bags of Silver Bullets

In the commercial crop growing world, applying fertiliser has become as routine as pulling on your boots in the morning. Take your pick; ‘pre - em’ (before emergence of the plants), post - em, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium. I was going to say that the list goes on but it doesn’t really; and that’s exactly the problem. Fertility, in soils and plants and farming, is so much more complex.

As a matter of fact, I’d like to take a hard stance on this one (shocking, I know). I think fertiliser has been misnamed. A fertiliser should be something that, when applied, adds fertility to your soil. Fertility is the ability of soil to sustain agricultural plant growth, consistently and sustainably. Everyones got that one great-great aunt Judith who had 11 healthy kids in 11 years. That’s real fertility, right there. 

But ‘fertiliser’ that comes in a bag, made in a factory from fossil fuels, with a label describing the 3 ingredients and how toxic they are… that’s not fertility. That’s a drug, a steroid. That’s raising a test-tube baby on an IV drip of just enough nutrients to live. Nothing to do with the ‘parents’ (soil) fertility, and nothing to do with the baby’s (plant) fertility.

Surprisingly, I’m not completely anti artificial fertiliser. It has its place, but only alongside practices that improve real fertility and balance the effects of the artificial stuff. Real fertility is using compost, vermicast, animal dung, improving soil carbon, correcting ph levels. Even by improving the water holding capacity of your soils, you’re adding capacity to capture more of the most important fertiliser, water! 

Over ¾ of the air around us is Nitrogen. Something tells me that mother nature wouldn’t make it a requirement to spread bags of granulated ammonium nitrate to make plants grow.