Elemental Business: Nitrogen Fertiliser
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2014
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nitrogen-based fertilisers have banished hunger in the rich world and ushered in an era of abundance. But they are a double-edged sword - the glut of food also comes with a glut of nitrogenous pollution that threatens to destroy our rivers and oceans. In our latest programme about the elements of the periodic table, Professor Andrea Sella of University College London tells presenter Justin Rowlatt why exactly our crops - and we humans - could not survive without nitrogen.
The BBC's Washington correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan sees - and smells - first-hand the denitrification of raw sewage, and hears from water scientist Dr Beth McGee of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation about the eutrophication of America's largest river estuary.
And, Justin travels to Norwich to meet Giles Oldroyd of the John Innes Centre, who is seeking to genetically engineer cereal crops that can fix nitrogen from the air. He also meets farmer David Hill, who explains the hi-tech lengths he goes to in order to squeeze the maximum yield out of his fertiliser.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a BBC podcast. You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:13.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Justin Rowlatt. Today we've got one of our regular features on the economics |
| 0:22.3 | of the chemical elements and we're back with that paradoxical but essential element, nitrogen. |
| 0:29.7 | The whole of agriculture is built on the use of nitrogen fertiliser. So without nitrogen fertilizers, |
| 0:36.1 | we can't feed the world. Simple as that. |
| 0:38.4 | But the vast use of nitrogen fertilizers has a downside. As our reporter, Regini Vidyanathan, |
| 0:48.7 | discovers. We're just walking in. There's lots of pipes and noisy machines in here. |
| 0:59.0 | Oh my goodness. You can really smell the sewage now. |
| 1:03.4 | That's Business Daily, taking you places you wouldn't normally go. |
| 1:13.0 | A week ago on this program, we discovered nitrogen's split personality. |
| 1:18.3 | This outwardly boring gas turned out to be the basis of almost all explosives. |
| 1:23.3 | In this week's program, we'll be replacing the big bangs with big smells as we look at nitrogen's other major industrial use in fertilizers. |
| 1:29.2 | At first glance, the story here seems an uplifting one. |
| 1:32.6 | Nitrogen-rich fertilizers used to be a rare commodity. |
| 1:36.1 | In the 19th century, wars were fought over them. |
| 1:39.2 | But all that changed early in the 20th century, |
| 1:42.2 | when the German chemists Fritz Harbour and Karl Bosch worked |
| 1:45.8 | out how to crack open the abundant yet previously inaccessible nitrogen molecules in the air. |
| 1:52.7 | Today, the Harbour Bosch process delivers fertilizer on a literally industrial scale, enabling |
| 1:58.8 | most of the planet to grow crops on a similarly industrial scale. |
| 2:03.0 | That's why in the rich world, obesity has replaced hunger as our biggest nutritional problem. |
| 2:09.3 | Just ask the fat boys. |
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