Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chemical Fertilizers
It's important to note that many chemical fertilizers are potentially just as damaging to
the soil as pesticides. Chemical fertilizers undergo chemical reactions in the soil that can
produce acids with a pH lower than 1.2 or bases with a pH above 11, both of which are ex-
tremely toxic to pretty much any living being. Even the fertilizers themselves, which are
salts, either destroy or interfere with the cell walls of microbes, hurting or killing them.
These fertilizers contain a lot of hydrogen, which kicks minerals out of the soil, depleting
the soil of nutrients with repeated use. Plants and microbes use hydrogen for this purpose,
too, but in a much more controlled fashion.
Oxygen is created during this chemical reaction and organic matter is burned up. Some
fertilizers even include or form formaldehyde, which does the same thing in the soil that it
did in your high school biology class when you used it to preserve specimens.
Chemical fertilizers are mostly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Consistent applica-
tions of these nutrients at the expense of the dozens of others that are needed creates an im-
balanced soil environment, not to mention the sewage sludge and toxic metals and all kinds
of other garbage that are often included in the fertilizers as filler. Most of the nitrogen —
and some of the phosphorus and potassium — leaches into our waterways causing all kinds
of problems to the greater environment. Manufacturers eventually started coating the fertil-
izer with nutrients such as chemical sulfur to decrease this problem by making the fertilizer
more “slow-release.” This sounds like a great fix on the surface, except when heavy doses
of sulfur combine with water to produce sulfuric acid and kill soil life.
We must definitely stop using the traditional chemical fertilizers such as urea (46-0-0),
triple superphosphate (0-46-0) and potassium chloride (0-0-60, including 40-50% chlor-
ide). These are what make up many of the conventional nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium
(NPK) fertilizers, such as 10-10-10, and they are extremely toxic.
Urea is consumed by bacteria that convert it to toxic anhydrous ammonia. It also reacts
with water to produce toxic ammonium hydroxide with a pH of 11.6, killing microbes and
harming seeds. If it's coated with sulfur, the sulfur reacts with water to form toxic sulfuric
acid with a pH of less than 1. Triple superphosphate is very acidic and binds with calcium
in the soil, making both unavailable, until eventually maybe 10-20% of the phosphorus can
become available with microbial breakdown. Potassium chloride often increases chloride
levels to 50-200 ppm in the soil, when 2 ppm of chlorine is often sufficient to sterilize
drinking water. Adding one pound of potassium chloride is like applying one gallon of
bleach. Too much potassium disintegrates clay and compacts the soil.
These products are harmful to soil life, acidify the soil and deplete it of nutrients, cause
compaction, burn up organic matter, pollute our water, and grow plants that invite predator
damage and can't properly mature food. The fertilizer industry would have us believe that
