Phosphate

This is the second in a series of blogs I intend to prepare in support of my assertion that industrialized agriculture is built on a house of cards. Energy for Power was the first. I intend to do a blog yet on each: water, nitrogen fertilizer, chemicals and globalization.

Nature moves in a cycle -- always -- and we disrupt that cycle at our peril. We can get away with this on the short run, but in the end nature will prevail! In the end it will always get the upper hand. Always!

Phosphate is an element essential to plant growth. Within nature, phosphate is taken up by the growing plant and returned to the soil when the plant dies, or if the plant is eaten by an animal, the phosphate is returned to the soil when the animal defecates, and to a small extent when the animal dies. This is the natural cycle.

The Chinese and Indian civilizations have mimicked this cycle for thousands of years, and as a result have been able to maintain the fertility of their fields for that length of time. (With industrialization, I have no idea what is happening in Chinese agriculture today.)

Industrialization takes a different approach. Every good industrialized farmer will test his field prior to planting. The soils lab will test primarily for N, P, K, and S, and will send back recommendations to the farmer as to how much of each of these elements he needs to add to his soil in order to maximize his yield, and of course he will follow those recommendations. The phosphate he will apply comes from mined phosphate deposits. Today, most of the phosphate used in North America comes from mines in Florida, but there are other phosphate deposits scattered here and there.

Of course the most accessible phosphate deposits are already gone, and this is reflected in the price of phosphate fertilizer. The story of the Pacific Island nation of Nauru makes for an interesting read in that regard. Depending on which authority you read, we have another 50 to 200 years of phosphate remaining. Personally, I do not find that approach helpful. For me it is simply logical: as long as we pay only for the cost of extracting any non-renewing resource, we will move from the most accessible to the less and less accessible -- the more and more expensive. Under pure free market economics, this extraction of these resources places no value on the needs of future generations.

Not being a mining specialist, I do no know exactly what this quote below means, but it clearly means that Florida P makes more sense today than BC P.

British Columbia and the Crowsnest Pass area has long been known to hold phosphate reserves in the billions of tonnes, but much of the rock is very deep and is very thin (1 to 2 meters thick).  This makes much of the rock very hard to mine and many of the claims in the area un-economical.  The CRO phosphate claims that we have acquired are known to be the best claims in the area with Cominco building an underground mining operation on the property in 1933.  The mines were reviewed in 1946 by Sproule (Cominco) and 1965 by Davies (Cominco) and it was concluded that the most favourable area in the Fernie basin was the CRO claims. However at that present time (1965), it was concluded that there would be no cost advantage from existing suppliers from other locations.

What makes the phosphate situation more challenging, is that as we inevitably shift our dependency to less accessible P, we are also moving towards more expensive energy. How will these two parallel shifts inter-play? I have no idea.

The irony is that there is a parallel problem to phosphate depletion -- phosphate pollution. Because humans are at the top of the food chain, every city has that problem, to a greater or lesser extent.

The technical solution to this problem is, in one sense, quite simple. All cities have a sewage disposal challenge, and to a large extent the challenge is how to dispose of the human fecal matter that is being collected. In Manitoba this challenge is currently coming to a head, as we find that Lake Winnipeg is becoming polluted with phosphates -- phosphate mined in Florida, passing through the food chain, and ending up in human waste which has been, traditionally, dumped into Lake Winnipeg. So we need to find ways of getting this back onto the land where the crops are growing. Learn from the Chinese! Can you see that happening?!

Were we, as a society, to agree that we have correctly identified the problem, how long would it take us to work out the solution sociologically; technically? How much time would we have?

If you want to check this out yourself, goggle "Peak Phosphate".