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Mike Howell (00:08):
The Dirt, with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podcast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by eKonomics.com, farming’s go-to informational resource, I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, views, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in.
(00:38)
Welcome back to The Dirt everyone. We hope you’re enjoying this season as much as we’re enjoying bringing it and getting the information out to you. As you know, we’ve been talking a lot about the different crops growing in North America. It’s planting time. A lot of these crops have already been put in the ground and we’ve got corn and soybeans up and going, cotton is right behind, and we realized that we hadn’t talked about rice yet. I know we’ve got a little bit of rice in the ground, some of it’s started to emerge, and we’ve got Dr. Trent Roberts with the University of Arkansas here with us today to help us go through rice production and talk about the fertility needs in rice. Trent, welcome to The Dirt.
Trent Roberts (01:11):
Hi Mike. Thanks for having me today and I look forward to our discussion.
Mike Howell (01:15):
Before we get into it, Trent, if you would, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do there at the University of Arkansas.
Trent Roberts (01:21):
My name is Trent Roberts and I’m a Soil Fertility Extension Specialist here with the University of Arkansas System, Division of Agriculture, and I kind of deal with all things soil fertility and plant nutrition related. I actually got my start specifically working on nitrogen in rice as a graduate student and that was really what I focused on the bulk of my career early on. Here lately I’ve moved into some other crops and some other nutrients, but I would say my heart and my passion certainly lies with rice production and fertilization.
Mike Howell (01:54):
Well, that definitely qualifies you to help us go through the topic today and we appreciate you joining us. You said you did a lot of work with nitrogen and we’re going to get to that in just a second, but before we do, tell us how many acres of rice are grown in Arkansas and what percentage of that is from the total US? I know Arkansas is one of our leading states, probably the leading state for rice production.
Trent Roberts (02:14):
Arkansas usually grows somewhere between about 1 to 1.5 million acres of rice and that obviously varies year to year based on rotations that producers are using and obviously commodity prices. I typically like to try to emphasize to people that there’s about 1.2 to 1.3 million acres of land where we should grow rice. Sometimes we plant rice where it shouldn’t be grown and there are problems with that, but usually about 1.2 to 1.3 is a sweet spot and typically Arkansas accounts for roughly half of the US rice production, so a very significant contributor to the rice industry in the United States.
Mike Howell (02:57):
You mentioned 1.2 to 1.3 million acres where rice should be grown and recently I’m hearing a lot of talk about some different rice production habits. Talking specifically about the furrow irrigated rice where they don’t actually flood the rice. Is that going to change the game in Arkansas? Is that going to open up more acres or is that just something that’s kind of a flash in the pan?
Trent Roberts (03:17):
I think that definitely there’s some acreage devoted to furrow irrigated rice that’s going to continue to be present in the coming years and it may even grow to encompass more of our acreage. So when we think about positioning furrow irrigated rice, it’s in fields with steep slopes that aren’t suitable for, we’ll just say conventionally flooded rice. If you’ve got levees where you can step from one levee to the next in a rice field, chances are it should be furrow irrigated rice, but one thing that we’ve seen is actually producers are shifting to furrow irrigated rice simply because of the labor and the cost savings associated with it. I think as producers start to see labor costs increase and fuel costs continuing increase, they’ll be more interested in furrow rice just from the labor and cost savings associated with it.
Mike Howell (04:12):
Can you give us an idea of how much acreage is in furrow irrigated rice now?
Trent Roberts (04:16):
We’ve seen that number continually increase over the last few years, so I would say last year we were somewhere between 15 and 20% of our acreage was true furrow irrigated rice production, so a pretty significant portion and if you look back as little as probably four or five years ago, that number would’ve been less than 5%. Within the last three to four years there’s been a significant increase in the proportion of our acreage devoted to furrow irrigated rice.
Mike Howell (04:45):
That definitely sounds like something we need to keep an eye out on and I know that’s going to present some interest in challenges as far as how we manage this crop on the horizon if we’d have more acres in the furrow irrigated rice.
(04:57)
Let’s move on and start talking a little bit about fertility needs in rice. You mentioned nitrogen already and you started off doing a lot of work with nitrogen. How much nitrogen does a rice crop need to go from planting to maturity and talk a little bit about how we can manage that nitrogen in a rice crop?
Trent Roberts (05:13):
Rice is pretty unique in the way that we produce it and I’ll talk a little bit specifically about the management and how that impacts how we manage nitrogen effectively in rice. When we talk about just total rates, season total nitrogen rates for rice, we historically have done what we call cultivar by nitrogen trials. Cultivar is a very important component in rice production and we see that different cultivars need different season total nitrogen rates. A big part of our program and the work that I do with Dr. Jarrod Hardke every year is when we have new rice cultivars that are introduced, we do nitrogen response trials to fine tune what those nitrogen rates are, a standard long grain conventional cultivar is going to need around 150 units of N per acre and typically we would either do a single pre-flood application or a two-way split application.
(06:11)
With a two-way split application we would put out about 105 units or pounds of actual nitrogen at the pre-flood timing and then we would come back three to four weeks later when we’ve reached a certain growth stage and put out an additional 45 units of N per acre to give us that 150 total.
(06:32)
If we shift to a single pre-flood type of application approach, we can usually get by with 120 to 130 units of N in a single application and still achieve similar yields, but with anything, if you put everything out or all your eggs in one basket, you run the risk of environment causing losses and things like that, so a lot of nuances go into that. Another aspect of rice production that plays into season total N rates are hybrid rice cultivars. They’ve been around for about 20 years now and they encompass typically at least 50% of the rice that’s grown in Arkansas and one unique aspect about hybrids is they benefit from a late season boot application of nitrogen, so they’re going to have similar nitrogen rates to our long grain conventional pure-line cultivars, but we’re going to do that single pre-flood application and then an additional boot application towards the end of the season, and that boot application is usually about 30 units of N per acre to give us that season total N rate.
Mike Howell (07:40):
You talked about putting some out pre-flood and then coming back with a split application on a lot of these and that’s going to be post flood and we have listeners from all over the world that tune into this and some of them have probably never even seen rice production. I’m sure somebody’s out there thinking, how in the world are we going to put this nitrogen out in a flooded rice field? If you would talk a little bit about that and how that application gets made.
Trent Roberts (08:02):
Rice, especially here in the United States is a very unique crop. What I always try to explain to people is we drill it, we plant it and we grow it like wheat for the first four to five weeks of the season, it’s not flooded, it’s an upland crop, and then once it gets to about the four to five week growth stage, we’re going to apply our pre-flood nitrogen application and we always use urea. The reason we use urea is it’s the highest granular nitrogen concentration of our nitrogen fertilizers. The bulk of the urea that we apply pre-flood actually goes out via airplane. That’s kind of why we’re locked into that urea box is because we need an ammoniacal nitrogen source with a high analysis. Urea is our go-to nitrogen source. We’re typically going to apply that nitrogen and then we’re going to apply a permanent flood of two to three inches and we’re going to maintain that flood for the duration of the season until we get ready for harvest.
(09:03)
What’s really unique about rice production is when we manage our water and our nitrogen effectively, we can see nitrogen use efficiencies from 85 to 90%. Domestic US rice production boasts some of the highest nitrogen use efficiencies of any crop in the world when it’s done correctly and it all goes back to the nitrogen source that we use, proper water management allows us to really lock that nitrogen in the soil and when we use an ammonium based form and we protect it with that flood, really the only loss mechanism is plant uptake that allows us to achieve very high nitrogen use efficiencies.
Mike Howell (09:45):
We have talked about the different loss mechanisms a time or two on the program before, but just to remind our listeners, we can lose it through leaching and volatilization, denitrification and then the way we want to lose it is definitely in the plant uptake. You said as long as we manage it properly. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What can growers do to make sure they keep that nitrogen in the field and going into the plant?
Trent Roberts (10:07):
So I like that you brought up the nitrogen loss pathways. I would just remind the listeners that the form of nitrogen that you apply or the form of nitrogen in the soil impacts the ways that it can be lost. Typically when we think about leaching and those types of things, it’s related to nitrate. When we think about ammoniacal or ammonium based fertilizers such as urea, they tend to not leach because they’re positively charged, so they’re attracted to the cation exchange sites. Really your loss mechanisms there are going to be tied to nitrification and then ultimately leaching or ammonia volatilization loss. When we use urea as our nitrogen source, our primary concern are losses due to ammonia volatilization. We’ve got very strict requirements for the timing of floods. If it takes you more than a certain number of days to flood your field, we want you to use a urease inhibitor to protect that urea, keep it in a urea form until we can get it incorporated with our flood.
(11:10)
But if you think about using urea, you’re going to form ammonium and then once we apply the permanent flood, we remove all of the oxygen from the system and when we remove oxygen from the system, we prevent nitrification because nitrification is a strictly aerobic process. That permanent flood keeps that urea nitrogen that we apply in the ammonium form. Really, we’ve eliminated a lot of those loss pathways that you’ve discussed and when I talk about proper water management, we have to keep that flood. That’s the tricky part because if we lose that flood and we reintroduce oxygen, now all of a sudden we start to get nitrification and then if we re-flood again, then we start to get denitrification. It’s very, very tricky and that water management plays a big role in how effective our nitrogen use efficiency is going to be.
Mike Howell (12:05):
If I understood right, as long as we keep the water managed correctly, the only time we can lose that nitrogen is the period between application and the water being established on that field. Is that right?
Trent Roberts (12:15):
Yes, sir, and that’s the tricky part. The timing between application and when we can get it effectively incorporated with that flood is really the critical time period and you brought up furrow irrigated rice earlier, the that’s a completely different production system where we’re not flooding it permanently. We’re treating it more like a furrow irrigated corn crop or a furrow irrigated cotton crop, so that lack of a permanent flood introduces new loss pathways that we don’t traditionally have in conventional direct seeded delayed flood rice production. That means in furrow irrigated rice, we really have to manage our nitrogen in a completely different manner in order to be effective.
Mike Howell (12:56):
Have you got it all figured out in the furrow irrigated yet or are you still doing research trying to learn what the best program is?
Trent Roberts (13:02):
We’ve done a lot of work. Justin Chlapecka, the rice specialist at Missouri, part of his graduate work was really focused on honing down those nitrogen rates and strategies and we have a really good handle on it. The hardest part, Mike, is we can have guidelines and protocols, but everyone irrigates on a different timing, a different schedule. We can get you close, but just understand that letting the field dry a day or two more than we recommend or keeping it flooded longer than maybe a traditional furrow irrigated system adds a whole lot of variables that change that effectiveness. Long story short, if you do it correctly, you can be very productive, but you do need more nitrogen. In most of our studies, we find that you need an additional 45 units of N, maybe even a little more to maximize that yield just because you’ve introduced a lot of these variables and loss pathways that we don’t have in that traditionally flooded rice system.
Mike Howell (14:05):
Trent, before we move on from nitrogen, is there anything else we need to talk about on nitrogen?
Trent Roberts (14:10):
The big thing with nitrogen is that’s what pays the bills. I don’t think we get a greater return on investment for any nutrient as we do for nitrogen and especially in rice production. You can go from some of the highest nitrogen use efficiencies to some of the lowest just based on your management. It’s very critical to know what you’re doing, make sure you understand the environment and all those variables to be successful.
Mike Howell (14:37):
Trent, if you would, let’s talk a little bit about phosphorus and what the crop needs in terms of phosphorus.
Trent Roberts (14:42):
Once again, rice is very unique because of that flooded situation and one thing we actually see in direct seeded delayed flood rice production is when we apply that permanent flood and we get those anaerobic soil conditions, a lot of times we get flushes of available phosphorus from the soil that you wouldn’t typically get for upland crops.
(15:04)
A lot of times what that means is rice is less responsive to phosphorus applications because when you flood it and you get that soil phosphorus, that typically wouldn’t be available for soybean or corn or cotton. It is available to the rice. Phosphorus deficiency isn’t something we see a whole lot of, but if you have very low soil test phosphorus, so typically less than eight parts per million soil test P and high pH, those are the scenarios where we do need to be on top of our phosphorus management and really our approach is you want to use a triple super phosphate or a adapt is what’s available in the mid-south where the bulk of the rice has grown and we want to encourage people to put it out pre-plant and incorporate it anytime they get a chance.
Mike Howell (15:53):
Trent, you mentioned that phosphorus is a lot of times more available in the rice system. Does that affect next year’s rotation crop? Does that make it less available for some of our other crops? Is that something they need to keep an eye on as well?
Trent Roberts (16:05):
It actually does. There’s a really unique scenario where when we flood the rice, we kind of get this flush of soil phosphorus that becomes available and when we drop that flood and we re-aerate the soil, it actually takes a lot of that soluble P and puts it back into compounds that are less available for our following crops. So some of the worst disasters I’ve seen in Arkansas is where we’ve planted corn behind rice because that rice just ties up all the soil phosphorus. Unless you’re putting out huge rates of P for your corn following rice, you’re going to have a major disaster, but I’m glad you pointed that out because it’s certainly a scenario where the P is less available for those following crops and really our saving grace in Arkansas is soybeans aren’t as responsive to phosphorus as some other crops are. We can get by with rotating soybeans and rice pretty easily, but you’ve really got to watch putting corn or cotton or other crops in the rotation.
Mike Howell (17:02):
And that’s going to go back to one of our very first podcasts we ever did and one of your colleagues there, Dr. Nathan Slaton talked to us about soil testing and how to interpret those results and I want to encourage everybody, if you didn’t listen to that episode, go back and listen to those first two episodes because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to tell what your crops are going to need.
Trent Roberts (17:21):
I’m sure Dr. Slaton did a great job of explaining that he was a great mentor to me and he’s taught me a lot about P and K and Arkansas production for sure.
Mike Howell (17:32):
Trent, let’s move on and talk about K. How much potassium are we going to need and when’s the best time to get that applied?
Trent Roberts (17:38):
When we talk about potassium, anytime you can do pre-plan incorporated is going to be the best option. Rice is not as responsive to potassium as soybean is. When we think about that, we can typically get by with lower rates. Dr. Slaton, myself and some of our other colleagues here recently have done a lot of work showing that the window of opportunity to apply potassium in rice and still maximize yield is really, really wide. What I mean by that is we can apply potassium all the way up to boot and rice and still get near maximal yield potential. With potassium, it’s more about trying to get it out pre-plan incorporated when you can, but if your rate was a little low or maybe you didn’t get it out, there’s still a huge opportunity to apply it and maximize your yield.
(18:28)
What we’ve started to encourage producers to do is think about in-season tissue sampling where we’re going to sample that uppermost collared leaf and we’ve got some really good correlation data to show you whether or not your potassium is sufficient, knowing that, okay, if I catch this at mid-season or into reproductive growth, I still have the opportunity to effectively correct it.
Mike Howell (18:52):
I appreciate you talking about the end season tissue test. That was another podcast topic that we did so people can go back and listen to that one as well. Sounds like you listened to all of my episodes and making sure you hit on all of them before you get done today. Trent, anything else on potassium management?
Trent Roberts (19:08):
When I think about nutrient management, and we’ll get into this in a minute maybe when we talk about micronutrients, I kind of rank their order based on how easy they are to correct, and potassium is one of those, at least in rice, the window of opportunity and our ability to correct it is pretty simple. It’s one of those I’m going to rank lower on the priority list.
Mike Howell (19:30):
Right. Well, before we jump in and start talking about some of the micronutrients, let’s get another big one out of the way. Seems like every meeting I go to these days and I’m actually leaving this week going to Scotland to the World Sulphur Symposium, but everybody’s talking about sulphur deficiencies these days. Is that an issue in rice as well?
Trent Roberts (19:49):
It can be, but it’s very specific situation, so I’ll just be upfront with you. I am not on the sulphur bandwagon, at least not in Arkansas, and I think there are a couple of reasons why we don’t see consistent sulphur responses in Arkansas. Sulphur availability is really driven by organic matter content and mineralization, but if you have a fair amount of organic matter and you get decomposition of that organic matter, it usually supplies adequate sulphur for your crop. In Arkansas, we don’t have a lot of organic matter, but our soils never really freeze. We get continual breakdown of that organic matter that just kind of slow releases sulphur into our soils, and so really the only time we see sulphur deficiencies in any of our crops and specifically rice is very, very sandy low CEC soils and it’s not widespread, but we do have a lot of areas of the state with sand streaks.
(20:49)
You’ll have a large clay field that either has sand streaks in it or you might have two or three inches of clay and then a foot of beach sand below that clay layer. You don’t see the sand, but it’s definitely a contributing factor and unfortunately in some of those scenarios it’s kind of a history of deficiency is how you have to approach it. It’s like, okay, I’ve farmed this field. I know there’s sand streaks I need to prepare to apply an ammonium sulphate application to help prevent that potential sulphur deficiency. Another thing that I think we have going for us here in Arkansas is almost all of our crops are irrigated and I think there’s just enough sulphate in a lot of our groundwater sources that help supply that sulphate throughout the season or that sulphur to the crop. Even if you’re borderline deficient in your soil, I think a lot of times we’re getting sulphur from our irrigation water that we’re not necessarily taking credit of.
Mike Howell (21:51):
Is that something that a grower needs to sample their irrigation water and see what the sulphate level is?
Trent Roberts (21:56):
There’s potentially something that they could consider. Irrigation water testing can get pretty expensive. It’s one of those types of things where ammonium sulphate is a great fertilizer source. It’s a little expensive if you’re just buying it for the nitrogen or the sulphur, but we have a lot of producers that essentially will use an ammonium sulphate as part of their fertilization program, and that usually takes care of it, but on the whole, most of our rice acreage is not going to respond to sulphur fertilization.
Mike Howell (22:30):
Earlier you mentioned the micronutrients. What specific micronutrients do we need to be concerned about in rice?
Trent Roberts (22:36):
I would say in rice, the single most important micronutrient is going to be zinc. Zinc is very important for rice production and it kind of goes back to what we talked about with phosphorus. Zinc is important for oxygen transport in the plant. If you think about a semi-aquatic plant like rice that we flood, it’s very important for that plant to be able to transport oxygen and use it effectively. If we have zinc deficiencies and we flood rice, it can kill it very rapidly and in a lot of ways I try to tell people you’re basically suffocating the rice because when you have a zinc deficiency, it can’t transport the oxygen and so it declines and will die quite rapidly. Zinc is going to be impacted by soil test, zinc concentrations obviously, but also pH, so high pH is going to restrict zinc availability in the soil.
(23:32)
If you look specifically at Arkansas production, our zinc recommendations are a combination of soil test zinc as well as soil pH. We take those two factors into consideration with pH is above 6.5, having slightly higher and different zinc fertilization recommendations than our low pH below 6.5 soils. But zinc is one of those that I’ve been preaching about a lot the last few years because it’s one of those issues that if you flood your rice and you identify a zinc deficiency, it is very expensive to correct because if you have flooded rice with zinc deficiency, you have to drain the water, which means you potentially lose some of your nitrogen from your pre-flood. You have to apply a corrective zinc application, which is usually going to be a foliar zinc chelate type of product. You’re going to have to apply additional nitrogen to cover what you lost, and then you’re going to have to re-flood that field so far and away preventative approach to zinc and rice more than pays for itself.
Mike Howell (24:43):
It sounds like that could be quite a costly mistake if you don’t get that zinc level right to start with. Trent, you also mentioned pH when talking about zinc, and I appreciate you bringing out the importance of that pH. That’s something we’ve spent a lot of time talking about in previous episodes, and I think everybody that’s been on the show at some time or another talks about pH. Appreciate you keeping that tradition going and hammering the importance of that soil pH.
Trent Roberts (25:07):
It’s tough in rice production. We typically in Arkansas where we use groundwater, have very high pH soils and that’s not easy to correct, right? When you have high pH soil, you’re just kind of stuck with it. You’ve got to learn to work under those conditions and zinc and phosphorus are the two that we really have to stay on top of our game to manage effectively. What I’ve been really preaching the last few years is if you can do soil applied granular zinc sulphate pre-plant in three to four years, you can build your soil test zinc level to a range where you don’t have to apply it anymore, and by doing that, you prevent any potential for zinc deficiency throughout the season. And when you compare that to the scenario I posed a minute ago with removing the water, applying the zinc, re-flooding, putting out additional nitrogen, I know zinc sulfate’s expensive, but if you have to go through that process, you’re going to wish you would’ve put out the zinc sulphate pre-plant.
Mike Howell (26:09):
Trent after zinc, what other micronutrients do we have to worry with?
Trent Roberts (26:13):
I don’t think there are others that we need to be concerned with in the mid-south and really in US rice production, we don’t see any other micronutrients being an issue. We’ve done some work with boron and some others and we just haven’t seen the response to those other micronutrients. It’s kind of odd and it’s hard to explain, but we can have a soil that we get very good responses to boron when we plant soybean, but if we plant rice on that exact same field, we get no response to boron. And so sometimes that’s a little hard for producers to understand. It’s like, well, if I need it for soybeans, why don’t I need it for rice? And with boron specifically, you just try to explain, well, soybean being a broadleaf has much different boron demands than rice, which is a grass crop, so that plays into it. And then just the availability in the flooded versus upland conditions. But boron gets a lot of attention and questions, but we’ve never seen significant yield increases when we apply boron to rice. So outside of zinc, I don’t think there’s much you have to worry about.
Mike Howell (27:24):
Dr. Roberts, we really appreciate you taking time to go through rice fertility with us today. I’m sure our listeners have got a lot of useful information out of this. Before we move on to our next segment, what’s your take home message about rice fertility, the main thing you want growers to take from this?
Trent Roberts (27:39):
Well, the take home message I think for everyone is, at least if you’re a rice producer, there’s a lot of great information out there from the land-grant universities across the country. Use that as a tool because I think there’s great field-based research out there to guide you on how to be an effective rice producer and manager nutrients effectively. If you’re a corn farmer in Iowa and Nebraska and you want to see something cool, give me a call and we’ll show you some rice production and it’ll definitely knock your socks off because it’s completely different than growing corn in Iowa. So very unique system and something you want to see if you’re a diehard farmer, for sure.
Mike Howell (28:21):
I’m going to caution anybody that calls you to come look at rice, make sure you bring your rubber boots with you and don’t be scared of water moccasins, because I’m sure you’ll run up on several walking those fields.
Trent Roberts (28:32):
We’ll just say ignorance is bliss. If you don’t know they’re there, they’re not there.
Mike Howell (28:37):
I know they’re there. That’s why I stay out of the rice fields as much as I can.
Trent Roberts (28:41):
One of my first trips downstate with Dr. Slaton, we drove past a field that had drain pipes and the end of it, and in every single one of those drain pipes, there were two or three water moccasins curled up in the end of it. And when he stopped the truck and said we were going in that field, I thought about just leaving and going to farm corn or something else because I did not want to deal with the snakes.
Mike Howell (29:05):
That’s the one thing in life that scares me is a snake. Well, Dr. Roberts, again, we appreciate you joining us today.
(29:13)
Listeners, if you’ve been tuning in this season, you know that at this part of the show we talk about somebody that’s famous in the world of agriculture, and we’ve already talked about the importance of nitrogen, and it was pointed out on today’s episode how important nitrogen is for rice production. And it’s been said that nitrogen is the single most important nutrient in crops today. Over 175 years ago, there was a big scientific debate going on in Europe talking about the importance of nitrogen for the growth of plants and two scientists, Laws and Gilbert actually settled that debate when they published a research paper talking about the addition of nitrogen fertilizers to increase wheat yields in England. Now about 50 years later, the industrialized nations of the world were challenged with how to feed their growing populations, and among those was Great Britain that was actually importing the majority of its wheat.
(30:05)
In 1898, William Crooks, who was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science called for chemistry researchers to find a solution to aid in the manufacturer of nitrogen fertilizers to help solve this food crisis. So this leads to the two people that we want to talk about today. The first is Fritz Haber, who in 1909 discovered that a chemical reaction of nitrogen and hydrogen would actually produce ammonia, and that is one of the main components in all of our nitrogen based fertilizers. In July of the same year, Germany’s largest chemical corporation, which was BASF, funded the German scientist and engineer Carl Bosch to develop a commercial scale production of ammonia. It wasn’t easy to develop that, and it took him several years to do it, but ammonia production depended on the high temperatures and pressure that was discovered by Haber.
(30:59)
Much of the necessary machinery had to be invented to handle the extreme production conditions. But in 1914, Bosch was able to unveil his machine. It stood about 26 feet tall and could produce about 198 pounds of ammonia per hour. Shortly after that World War I broke out and they used the plant to produce explosives for use in the war. Now, Germany was trying to keep the Haber-Bosch process a secret, but during some treaty negotiations, Bosch who was a member of the German negotiating team offered the French government the technical details that they would need to build their own Haber-Bosch plant.
(31:36)
The French began producing ammonia in the early 1920s, and it soon followed to the Americas. We owe Haber and Bosch a big debt of gratitude for their contributions to this. Without them, we would not be able to produce the nitrogen fertilizer that we need today. Both of these men were awarded Nobel Prizes. One in 1920 went to Haber for the research that unlocked ammonia production, and in 1932 there was another one that went to Dr. Bosch and Frederick Burgess for the development of the high pressure system that was needed. Dr. Roberts, I know you’ve studied about nitrogen production and have probably studied the Harbour Bosch process in detail. Is there anything else that you want to add about that?
Trent Roberts (32:18):
I just think it’s amazing, and there were some stats that came out either earlier this year or late last year where they estimated 50% of our current world population is here as a sole right effect of the Haber-Bosch process. Without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, we wouldn’t be able to support our current world population. And to me, that really drove home how important that process was. And I don’t remember who said it, but someone said Norman Borlaug was the Green revolution that developed better cultivars, more resistant varieties, but it was the Haber-Bosch process that fueled those varieties to give us the food supply we have today.
Mike Howell (33:03):
That’s exactly right. And another thing that amazes me that work was done nearly 200 years ago when they developed this process, and it still hasn’t been replaced today, just look at all the modern technology that we have that we didn’t have just a few years ago, and the number of things that have been updated just in our lifetimes. But this process is still here, and it’s the main source of nitrogen fertilizer today. I’m sure one day somebody will come up with a better method, but this method has stood proven for years now.
(33:31)
Listeners, we appreciate you joining in today. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. I want to invite you back next week when we come to you live from the World Sulphur Symposium. We’ll be talking with several researchers over there and finding out more about sulphur nutrition. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt.
