Did you know?

The number one food crop grown in the world is rice. It feeds half of the world’s population.

Role of Nutrients

Nutrients play a unique role in replenishing our soils and sustaining the world’s growing need for food, fiber and fuel.

Why do we need to continually replenish nutrient levels?

As crops grow, they remove nutrients from the soil. If these nutrients are not replaced, soil quality and productivity decline. While this is a gradual process, it is the reason many early civilizations failed. Their soil simply could not support the food needs of their growing populations. With time, farmers in Egypt and China found ways to sustain crop production by adding nutrients back to the soil through the addition of animal wastes.

The world found a way to economically provide the nitrogen needed to sustain our soils and growing population when Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch perfected a method in the early twentieth century for producing ammonia from hydrogen and air. This, in part, fueled the green revolution - helping farmers to increase production from 692 million tonnes of grain in 1950 to 1.9 billion tonnes of grain in 1992, on essentially the same land base.

However, soil degradation due to nutrient removal still occurs today. In impoverished and war-torn areas of the world, farmers are not able to replace nutrients removed by crops. This has led to desertification and the destruction of rainforests.

Even in developed countries, nutrient replacement has lagged removal in some areas. By working with growers, industry associations, government, and researchers, Agrium strives to ensure nutrients are applied in amounts that sustainably replenish soils.

Sustaining World Food and Energy Needs

As society strives to achieve energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, governments are increasingly looking to agriculture to supply greater amounts of bio-fuel. In the past five years, United States corn use for ethanol has grown from 11 percent of the total production in 2002/03 to 23 percent in 2007/08. It is estimated that over 34 percent of the United States corn crop will be used to produce ethanol by 2012/13.

This is occurring at a time when world food grain stocks are at an all-time low and population growth is continuing to increase. As well, a growing global middle class is increasingly demanding more protein-rich foods, requiring grains to be fed to animals. An essential component in the production of this protein, is nitrogen.

Experts estimate that commercial fertilizer is responsible for the basic food needs of at least 40 percent of the world’s population. While this is a tremendous achievement we know more must be done, as all too many people do not have enough food to live, let alone achieve a higher standard of living.

Agrium is proud to be part of an industry that provides these life-sustaining resources and maintain the quality of one of the world’s most precious resources – our soil.

Did you know?

That the 99% of your human body mass is made from just 6 elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus.

Oxygen	65%
Carbon	18%
Nitrogen	3%
Calcium	1.5%
Phosphorus	1%
Potassium	0.35%

Learn more about nutrients here: Nutrient World