[Frozen-Stick]

There is a biological mechanism called "Biological Nitrogen Fixation" (BNF).
This has nothing to do with GM.
Plants like peas, beans, rape, lentil etc. (legumes) are doing this since millions of years. Special Bacteria (Diazotrophs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diazotroph) live in symbiosis with this plants.
They get carbohydrates from the plants and in response they are able to fix molecular nitrogen under aerobic conditions.
They produce even more than what the plant need for growing. So these plants are very good pre-plants for grain or potatoes.
So this is already known. But what is new now is that agricultural research discovered, that there are bacteria that can also be used for wheat, corn, sugar cane or rice!
So you can reduce the amount of fertilizer used drastically!
In Brasilia there is very few fertilizer used for growing sugar cane because of "Acetobacter diazotrophicus".
You just have to inoculate your seed with the right bacteria.
Two important bacterias respectively key-words (for use with corn or wheat):
"Spirillum lipoferum" and "Azospirillum brasiliense"
The bacteria can be ordered in certain shops i think.

Two links for BNF (i think they are a bit out of date, but are quite good for understand more):
http://nap.edu/readingroom/books/bnf/chapter1.html
http://www.soils.wisc.edu/~hickey/Soils ... _section2/

And two links to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizobia

Other techniques are:
Planting legumes with grain in one field (i think it is possible for example to combine lineseed with peas, because they can be harvested together)
Planting trees in rows in the field (Agroforestry: http://www.montpellier.inra.fr/safe/english/index.htm), although there is a loss of about 5% in profit during the years until felling the trees, you gain an extra profit by selling a very good wood at the end (e.g. Cherry-tree, walnut-tree), if you take care of the growth of the trees. In the first years the outer roots of the trees have to be cut so that the ground beside the trees does not get dry in summer.

The benefit is shade, a protection against wind erosion and dry-up, useful insects get a beautiful home, minerals from down under are prepared and delivered by leaf fall, the water cycle and the humidity are improved etc., etc., etc. ....

[Caoimhan]

Interesting stuff!

I knew about the nitrogen fixing of legumes, and that alternating legumes with grains was a good idea, but this is excellent news about bacterial strains that will work with grains, too!

[coyote]

OK, I'll open up this can of worms.

Wheat, corn and rice are all pretty staple grains... Is this nitrogen fixing the sort of thing which could be done on a large scale? Could it possibly help to mitigate against a possible food shortage and even dieoff during Peak Oil? To become, in effect, the Green Revolution Part II?

I freely admit my ignorance of agricultural issues (something I hope to change shortly). What do you experts think?

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('coyote', 'O')K, I'll open up this can of worms.

Wheat, corn and rice are all pretty staple grains... Is this nitrogen fixing the sort of thing which could be done on a large scale? Could it possibly help to mitigate against a possible food shortage and even dieoff during Peak Oil? To become, in effect, the Green Revolution Part II?

I freely admit my ignorance of agricultural issues (something I hope to change shortly). What do you experts think?

[Colorado-Valley]

We have an old-fashioned farm, and we always rotate alfalfa (a nitrogen-fixing legume) with corn crops. We also spread manure from our cattle herd on the land, and then plow it in, adding nitrogen and organic matter to the soil.

We've never had to buy chemical fertilizer.

In our garden, we grow white clover as a cover crop. It's a nitrogen fertilizer and is very pretty.

[aflatoxin]

Without dusting off my botany text or my handbook to organic gardening:

I think alfalfa and clover fix about 70 pounds of N2 an acre per season. No Potassium or phosphorus in there though.

But, it also does what no anhydrous chisel can do: It puts a lot of organic material into the ground, prevents erosion, sends roots down 6 feet, plus provides food for tasty domestic animals. Oh yeah, honeybees dig it too.

If it is planted with hay grass, you get a permanent pasture that is fairly maintenance free. The guy that lives behind me has a couple of horses, plus a cow and a bunch of poultry on his 3 acres, and I don't think he has to buy hay at all.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Colorado-Valley', 'W')e have an old-fashioned farm, and we always rotate alfalfa (a nitrogen-fixing legume) with corn crops. We also spread manure from our cattle herd on the land, and then plow it in, adding nitrogen and organic matter to the soil.

We've never had to buy chemical fertilizer.

In our garden, we grow white clover as a cover crop. It's a nitrogen fertilizer and is very pretty.

[Frozen-Stick]

@coyote
Yes you can enhance your soil in a lot of ways, for example with biological manure. First planting legumes which fix the nitrogen of the air into the ground.
But other plants like wheat, corn or sugar cane (?) don't do that naturally, i think.
I think that it is a special work of the following scientists
(" Boddey, R. M., S. Urquiaga, V. Reis, and J. Döbereiner. 1991. Biological nitrogen fixation associated with sugar cane. Plant Soil 137:111-117."
http://biblioweb.dgsca.unam.mx/libros/m ... /c9bi.html)
to find a bacterium for sucar cane - I don't know if it was there already - that does this BNF.
The effect of using this sort of bacteria you can see in Brazil (of course not only in Brasilia ).
So the same effect should be or is possible with the bacterium "Spirillum lipoferum" or "Azospirillum brasiliense", which are, i think different types of bacteria, in ALL THE WORLD

I learnt this facts from a guy in a german forum, who is a scientist for biology or something like that.

And you do the best for your ground even more if you plant trees on the wide open fields. Trees (e.g. alder, oleander, juniper) are improving not only the structure of the soil with their roots, they also deliver a lot of nutritants from beneath to the upper levels of the soil. They can catch water from deep down also.

Im reading every day in the moment a little part of an online book in german, which is called "The last chance (for a future without need)": http://www.regenwurm.de/fr001.htm.

It is absolutely fascinating because i learnt already so much about life, stones, erosion, plants, trees and many very important aspects of the european and the world history. I know now for example why there was build a hospital for healing patiences with tubercolsis just in the suiss village of davos:
It was because of the low concentration of Tbc-bacteria in altitudes between 1400-1600m above Sea Level in the beginning of the 20th century.
Another story is why, as ONE example, Britain had to fight such many wars with other countries in the Middle Ages. It was because they really had no idea how to cultivate a soil in the best form. After the farmer destroyed the rest of the humus they began with sheep farming and the soil got even worse. But with the money they got by trading with sheep wool it was possible for them to buy food and to build an Empire.
In France and other european countries there was no difference. A lot of famines wiped through all the continent since the people began in the eleventh century with felling the trees.
And all this farmers, in the hope of getting a place to grow food, with no idea of eccological and lasting farming went to the untouched grounds of newly discovered America. And there they began to decultivate with their methods the prosperous landscapes all over your country.
Just because the untouched soils in the USA were extremely rich and good, especially in the south, during several centuries there was no need to fertilize the land or to do other things. The USA even helped Europe in the 19th century with food exports.

In the 20th century even in the USA it was noticed that the productivity of the soils went down but there came as the great help the artificial fertilizer.

But know when the fertilizer gets too expensive all farmers and the whole food industry are getting more and more problems.
Like in Europe the thickness of the humus layer in all the states is know really, really thin. Artificial fertilizer, by the way, is not only very expensive nowadays, it even destroys the very valuable life of the soil with all the small insects, bacteria and fungi. And this life is absolutely necessary to have a good soil structure and a good productivity of the land.
By feeding it with organic matter it will be happy and fertile (doing parties all the night)
But delivering enough organic manure or matter to all the fields would be really expensive and a lot of work too. Trees are doing this just every second every where.
No tilling is another method by not desturbing the valuable life beneath. This life produces not only nitrat or ammonium but also carbon dioxid which is also a nutriant.

I am no analytical chemist and no biologist. I am just an engineer, but for me with my awareness of peak oil and with my fears this possibilities by doing the right things in nature or using nature are looking like the best way we can go.

This year i am starting with my first own small garden and i am now already hoping for a lot of juicy corn for barbecue partys!

[Frozen-Stick]

To the following Link i have to make some restrictions on the content: http://www.regenwurm.de/fr001.htm.
The book "The last chance", which is the source of the text, was published in 1950 in Bavaria (State of Germany). The author was the woman of Raoul Heinrich Francé (Hungarian), Annie Francé-Harrar. He was a very famous biologist and scientist for all things having to do with the micro life in the ground.
So the text is quite old and therefore is the language a bit old fashioned.
For me it was for the tone a bit a like a "New Age"-book and some passages are quite boring.
Nevertheless are the facts mentionend in there sometimes really astonishing.

Another problem is that the book was apparently scanned in but not reviewed. So there really many mistakes in the orthography like u instead of ü or hx instead of k. Translating it e.g. with Google-Translation will therefore not bring the usual quality of usual foreign texts.
Therefore i want to show a link with almost the same text (complete reviewed but a lot of chapters are missing):
http://wiki25.parsimony.net/cgi-bin/wik ... iki63512;1
The starting page is here, but there is no Button for getting to the next chapter:
http://wiki25.parsimony.net/cgi-bin/wik ... chheitTeil

Perhaps this theme is better posted in a garden forum but i thought that the information about a biological solution for saving fertilizer and therefore saving natural gas SHOULD be placed in here.