Nitrogen Use Threatens Habitat

An
ecologist is warning that using nitrogen as a fertilizer will cause far more damage to the
environment in future years. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham
reports:

Transcript

An ecologist is warning that using nitrogen as a fertilizer will cause far
more damage to the environment in future years. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Farmers use nitrogen to fertilize the soil. They couldn’t produce nearly as
much food without it. But nitrogen runoff in rivers and in the gulf of
Mexico has caused dead zones. David Tilman is an ecologist with the
University of Minnesota.


He’s found as more nitrogen enters the environment…
there’s also damage on land. He says some noxious weeds thrive in a high
nitrogen environment while many native plants die off. Tilman says as demand
for food goes up, nitrogen use will only increase…


“We all eat food. We need farmers to be efficient producers of food
as they are now and yet what we are saying as a society we have to help
farmers find ways to grow food that has less nitrogen that’s added to the
system and less leaking out of the system.”


Tilman says high-tech precision fertilizer application and new strains of
crops could help reduce the amount of nitrogen needed to grow food.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.