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Plowing Carbon Into the Fields
OzPeter writes "A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at the same time saves himself up to $500,000 (AUD) that would have been required to fertilize his 3,900 hectares in the traditional way. Yet his crop yields over the last two years have been at least on par with his best yields since 2001. The technique was developed by a Canadian, Gary Lewis of Bio Agtive, and is currently in trial at 100 farms around the world."
What chemical process is converting the CO2, into not-CO2? He's not burying that carbon deep enough to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few days. Best case for him, perhaps some nitrogen compounds in the exhaust are ending up in the soil, but otherwise, this sounds like a gimmick.
Having absolutely no experience with any farming techniques, any real knowledge of the chemical composition of cooled diesel exhaust or even having read the article, I still somehow feel confident enough to give a vague denouncement of this farming technique.
AHEM.
This will never work because the gas will escape/it will poison the ground/I am so much smarter than whoever came up with this.
Thank you, thank you. Love ya Slashdot. Never change.
So few facts, so many opinions.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I think the argument to this mechanism is that he is providing an extra carbon source for the nitrogen fixers natively present in the soil. These bacteria convert N2 into ammonia, which can then be absorbed by the plants. Essentially drives the nitrogen cycle more quickly than would occur otherwise. Alternatives in place are to do alternate plantings with plants that have rhizobiums such as legumes.
As to the people saying this is not carbon neutral, I think you should read up on the Haber-bosch process - how ammonia is made for fertilizer. Unlike microbes which can do this at room temperature and pressure, it takes something like 400 C at several times Earth's pressure. This is a very expensive process, and cutting down ammonia production will save a lot of energy.
Funny this sounded familiar, I submitted the story about the Canadian farmer three years ago. That article says it was developed by a farmer named Darrel Carlisle and is generally more informative.
Considering this stuff normally goes into the air and can be brought back down by rainfall... it probably is already in your bread.
That's nothing! NOTHING! Have you even seen what's in pig, chicken, cow, and sheep manure? And they actually use that stuff to grow food. I mean it's the feces of animals, and they're dumping it on our food to make it grow. But somehow the food is okay and safe to eat. Maybe there's something about plants that allows them to thrive on things that are poisonous to us, but allows them to produce fruits and vegetables that are also edible to us.
I have nothing compelling to say
As has been written in here several times, lotta nitrate compounds in diesel exhaust, even more so than gasoline motor exhaust due to the much higher compression ratios that diesel engines require to run on. Plants need CO2, but they also need nitrates and nitrides in order to grow. As far as carbon compounds in the exhaust, I dunno if they escape the soil (being gaseous) or get bound up to become part of the plants immediately or what. I would have loved to see a more technical article than TFA, that's for sure.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
(Currently, California has no additional land for farming or ranching to meet the needs of the ballooning population.)
California has plenty of land for farming. All along the back of the Sierra Nevada there is a huge valley full of decent land; the problem is water. All the water is being diverted into LA for drinking. If LA starts getting their water from the ocean, then we can begin to grow stuff there. The foothills would be another potential place to start growing, if the water were there. Also, if we really need to, we can switch from crops like almonds to crops like wheat or oats.
Wait. Now, you ask, "How will banning immigration help?"
Anti-immigration laws are like the war on drugs: neither one works. You may not realize it, but after drugs, one of the best sources of income for organized crime is human-trafficking: sneaking poor people into rich countries. If you continue to support anti-immigration laws, you will continue to support violence, human exploitation, and all the other problems that come with organized crime. There is no way to stop it. The only thing to do is legalize it.
People who worry about overpopulation don't realize that if we increase women's rights and reduce poverty in developing nations, the problem will take care of itself.
Qxe4
You could fix overpopulation and starving with exactly the one thing. Cannibalism.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
It's nice that you're so sure actual scientists know less than you, and that there's no such thing as nitrogen fixing bacteria, and that they sure aren't fucking anaerobic and like CO2. Christ.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
Anti-immigration laws are like the war on drugs: neither one works. You may not realize it, but after drugs, one of the best sources of income for organized crime is human-trafficking: sneaking poor people into rich countries. If you continue to support anti-immigration laws, you will continue to support violence, human exploitation, and all the other problems that come with organized crime. There is no way to stop it. The only thing to do is legalize it.
All you need to do to end it is require proof of citizenship(that's actaully checked out) to get hired in this country. Then charge companies who don't comply with rico laws (sieze their assests etc) . This will never happen since companies make too much money off the backs of illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage.
They'll just blow up the tractor and use a photo-spectrometer to measure the emissions.
If it can't be blown up, then it don't belong on Mythbusters.
Or you can read the article and see that CO2 helps anaerobic bacteria that also happen to be nitrogen fixers...guess the journalists know more than you, after all.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Not that blowing it into the atmosphere is much better, but doesn't diesel exhaust contain all sorts of nasty toxins?
I don't recall the exact exhaust gas composition, but in my younger days working at a research lab we participated in a series of animal studies on diesel exhaust. You could pump a lot of diesel exhaust through lab animals without any serious side effects. Some of the high dose groups had lungs that looked like they had been smoking, but none of them died from toxins in the exhaust. I don't remember there being any statistical correlation to cancers or cell differentiation, either. But that was a long time ago.
My vague memory of the conclusions were that you breath a lot of diesel exhaust without harmful side effects, although the particulates would keep your pulmonary macrophage in business.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Fertilizer is nitrogen and phosphorus. Exhaust is carbon and oxygen. Can one pair really be replaced by the other?
"The exhaust gases are believed to stimulate microbial activity and root growth, allowing the plants to more efficiently extract nutrient and moisture from the soil."
What keeps the injected CO2 from leaking back out?
"The system relies on attraction between negatively-charged ions in the gases and the soil’s positively charged alkaline component to hold the gases in the soil, as well as sealing it in."
http://abovecapricorn.blogspot.com/2009/10/soil-carbon-may-come-from-tractor.html
Immigration is already legal. It's those that try and skip the system in place that give it a bad name. I know many legal immigrants and they hate illegal immigrants more than native Americans because they (the illegals) just made it harder for them (the legals) to follow the rules.
Have you even seen what's in pig, chicken, cow, and sheep manure?
Bullshit.
It seems to be these days that there are a lot of people that can't possibly believe there are any ecological solutions that don't involve the massive reduction in human emissions. When the talk is about global warming and reducing carbon output, they are on board and scream "You aren't a scientist, you have to listen to the scientists!" to anyone who questions it. However, when scientists have any other solution, one that DOESN'T involve an emission reduction, they get pissed off, and denounce those scientists. Suddenly they are experts in all the reasons that must be wrong.
A good example of this is what has happened with the new book Super Freakonomics. Levitt does the same thing he does in the original Freakonomics of stripping away morality from various issues and applying economics. His original book drew ire from conservative types because it presented a convincing argument that legalized abortion has lead to a reduction in crime, but liberal types were generally ok with it.
Well, now he's become someone high up on the enemies list because in Super Freakonomics he analyzes the economics of combating global arming through geoengineering methods, rather than reducing emissions. Note that he doesn't say it isn't real or isn't a problem, just looks at different solutions as being more economically feasible. Yet that has drawn massive ire from the environmentalist types.
It just seems to be an article of faith these days that the only thing good for the environment is to use less. Any solutions that involves anything else is shouted down. This being the same sort of thing. People point to science as the ultimate bastion of truth... so long as what it shows agrees with their world view. Any time something contrary comes out, all of a sudden they are the experts instead of the scientists.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You should go hang out with illegal immigrants sometime, you would learn something.
Here's how it works: all the family pools their money together to make the downpayment. The price varies depending on where they come from. Mexico will run around $2000 to $5000 but a trip from China will cost $20,000. Of course a Chinese peasant can't pay all that at once, so they come to America, and work, and pay it off while they are here. Of course it takes time, but they pay it off, otherwise something might happen to their family back at home.
So yes, poor people are the ones who get snuck into the US. Middle class/rich people usually have no desire to come here, at least not the ones I've talked to.
Qxe4
I found the article by "The Economist". The article debunks the claim that increasing wealth results in a decreasing population. The implications for excessive population growth are alarming.
You didn't find an article that backs your assertion. There are at least two effects to note. First, high HDI countries (which boils down to high GDP per capita countries) tend to have high immigration by more fertile populations from low HDI countries. Second, that hypothetical increased fertility rate is spread over a longer period (ie, people having children later) which results in lower population growth.
As has been mentioned here before, the point of fertilizer is to provide nitrogen, and to a lesser extent, phosphorus and sulfur, not carbon. So how is diesel exhaust providing those elements in sufficient quantity? It's worth noting that this farmer has only been doing it for two years. That's far too short to make the sort of claims he's making.
Doing the math, he's claiming that he saves on about 400 tons of fertilizer for a 3900 hectare farm by pumping roughly 4,000 tons of diesel exhaust into the soil. At a glance, most of this is water, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. There's a little bit of nitrogen oxides and sulfur. But I don't see the advantage. I'm wondering, if he's getting some nitrogen and other elements from the death of necessary fauna in his soil. That is, he might be getting a couple of good years of crops by killing off most of his earthworms, nematodes, and other animals in the soil who would be poisoned by excess CO2 and CO levels.
I believe that the previous poster may have made the same brilliant intellectual leap that I independently made, and went to the Company's web page.
There you will find a video:
http://www.bioagtive.com/index.php?p=0&videoID=852
that is full of fascinating information about the process, and explains it much more coherently than 4th person version of the events that we get from Slashdot's summary.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
That so-called study is a fine example of lying with statistics - see debunking here http://www.stubbornmule.net/2009/09/baby-bounce/
Do you really want to spend the last years of your life in an old farts' home, watching Coronation Street, waiting to die? Fuck that!
If that's your idea of "retirement", just pull the f*ing plug now and spare us your waste of oxygen.
Actually that's your idea of retirement, it certainly doesn't have to be that way and thats not just a question of money. It's not a bad thing to allow people to work beyond pensionable age if they wish too maybe volunteer work could be better than shifts in Macdonald's, finance shouldn't be the reason. Thats a key point at that age you should be able to decide what you want to do with your life and watching coronation st isn't an aim.
I've come close to dying twice this year I got out of hospital on Friday and the last thing I want is to die anytime soon. I have a lot more living to do yet. There is no good reason why I can't be doing pretty much the same range of activities in my 60's and beyond that I am capable of now. I'm a bit more focused on living and getting healthier knowing that I am only alive today thanks to modern medicine. Thirty years ago I would have died about 4 months ago.
Odds of my making it to retirement are a bit piss poor to be honest, however there is no reason to quit just yet.
Quit smoking eat less, fats especially , keep active mentally and physically and then you might get the choice of sitting in your slippers watching coronation st - you probably still wouldn't want to.
It's strange to me that 90% of the things we can buy to eat today damage us so that by the time we hit retirement age we are about ready to croak. You don't think about this till the damage is done usually but it doesn't have to be this way. It is possible to make healthier choices and thats whats going to save you from Coronation st.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
While I respect your modest proposal, I've always felt that human flesh to be a bit gamey. Even as a zombie I still prefer chicken.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Are you off on your overpopulation maunderings again?
The world isn't overpopulated. It is likely that most of the parts of the world you think are overpopulated (with the notable exceptions of China and India) have lower population densities than the parts you think are not overpopulated.
If the world were overpopulated, we've already proved out a simple, humane solution to the problem - raise everyone's standard of living to that of the USA and Western Europe. Then birthrates will fall naturally to low enough levels that population will decline.
Course, in that case, there's not yet any reason to believe that the population decline will STOP, but that's a problem for another day.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Well, self-service is a gain, IMHO. I avoid filling up in Weymouth, MA, and I fill up right before entering Jersey. Why? "Full Service" is no longer full-service staffed by entry-level mechanics or senior mechanics manning the pumps during slow times; it's now mouth breathers, and NOT full service. They don't clean your windshield, check your fluids, or the air pressure in your tires. What they do is top off the tank, keep clicking the pump until they can't get any more in (often times damaging your charcoal canister), scratch your paint, and be rude to you. Why should I pay a premium to damage my car?
In SOME rare cases a "loss" in service is actually a net gain. I'd rather get out, fill it myself, taking care to not overfill, not scratch the paint, and clean the window without leaving streaks, and clean the back window if it needs it. The ONLY drawbacks are my hands smelling like gasoline for a short while, and dealing with cold in the winter.
Now, if "full service" were the full service that used to be in place through the '70s, I'd agree.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Dude, I'm French and even by trying the legal way (visa lottery) I didn't get anything. Even if I had the chance to be picked by the computer, it would have taken two years before I would have been allowed to move to the USA. Fortunately being European if I want to move to a decent country I can just move to some place like Ireland (which I did).
Mexicans aren't even eligible to that visa lottery thing. That doesn't leave them a lot of solutions, unless they've got close family in the USA. Immigration law in the USA is completely absurd, and it makes illegals because it leaves so many people without any legal solution.
Think about it, a hundred years ago all you had to do was show up at Ellis Island and if you didn't have tuberculosis you were in. Now you can be Australian or English and if you manage to get in you live under the permanent threat of deportation for no good reason.
You just got troll'd!
Not sure what diesel engines you've been dealing with, but I've never seen one without a throttle.
A diesel engine receives fuel based on RPM and, you hope, load. The pedal in the car controls the maximum position of a governor which controls maximum fuel delivery. As the engine approaches this speed (as output meets load) the fuel delivery decreases until a given RPM is reached. Or in the words of a pedant, a diesel has an accelerator pedal, but no throttle. In a carbureted vehicle the throttle controls both air and fuel delivery directly. In fuel-injected gasoline vehicles, the pedal usually controls an intake restrictor butterfly valve, and a throttle position sensor which instructs the computer (in unison with the oxygen sensor.) Diesels should have as much intake air as possible.
Even without a throttle they don't burn perfectly, ever.
True.
If done properly it simply results in less than the maximum amount entering the combustion chamber. With fuel injection engines it should not result in an improper ration of air to fuel, just less of both.
In both fuel injected and carbureted engines you err on the side of richness, and during closed loop operation (e.g. cruising, idle, deceleration, or mild acceleration) the mixture continually bounces to either side of rich and lean. The catalytic converter smooths out the rich and lean spots before they become emissions, because it swings back and forth several times a second.
You think all that black you see pooring out of the engine under high load is CO? No.
No, that's partly those PAHs and partly unburned hydrocarbons, one of the primary bad guys when it comes to emissions. The NOx output of diesels is only significant in the aggregate; it's higher than that of typical gasoline-powered vehicles. Biodiesel has more NOx, but less CO. Nitric oxides are a major component of acid rain.
in smaller quantities its not a problem, the body deals with carbon monoxide in our atmosphere by simply replacing the cells that have been rendered useless by carbon monoxide.
but I was using those.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look at all these carcinogens
All in extremely low quantities and most of which are filtered out/ broken down by modern DPF and/or SCR.
Diesel is not the dirty thing of yesteryear. Reports of hazardous exhaust is greatly exaggerated and outdated. Basically the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe is CO2 and H2O.
And yes I am a diesel emissions engineer.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".