A number of commenters are pointing out that natural fertilizers exist. That is true. It is also true that artificial fertilizers were invented because around 1900 humanity ran out of biologically accessible ("fixed") nitrogen that it could convert to crops. The key nitrogen atom in roughly half of the amino acids in your body was part of a nitrogen-nitrogen pair floating in the atmosphere until it was fixed in a factory. If all the factories making fertilizers shut down tomorrow, there would be mass famine.
You are correct that your argument is a common one. There is also a common response - the invention and use of artificial fertilizers allowed us to dispense with good land use practices, hammer the land with chemicals to squeeze as much crop out of it as possible, and dramatically raise the amount of crop grown for meats and industrial outputs like corn syrup and ethanol. We have way more crop land than is required to feed our population a healthy diet, we are degrading our soil, and modern farming economics have become so dependent on industrial inputs that farmers in India have committed waves of suicide after becoming so indebted to Monsanto/Bayer that they are unable to imagine any future for themselves.
You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow, but that only speaks to our dependence on them due to economic and social factors, not their inherent necessity to our ability to feed ourselves. Essentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end.
What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.
> Ban on chemical fertilizers in Sri Lanka resulted in famine.
Did you read his post?
> You are right that we are so dependent on artificial fertilizers that we cannot simply cease production tomorrow... [e]ssentially no one is saying we should shut down all the factories tomorrow so the argument is a dead end.
then...
> What many people are saying however, is that we went very far down the wrong road, and we are paying the price today. We must figure out how to bring our farming practices back in to balance with ecology.
Sounds about right, especially re: soil ecology and habitat destruction with regards to commercial farming practices. Not sure why you're using Sri Lanka as an example when the Sri Lankan govt. did exactly what he's saying isn't reasonable to expect.
Why does it matter if I'm putting syntheticly manufacturer nitrogen on my garden or if I'm putting the blood of farm animals, dried and powdered onto my crops?
The end result is the same. Blood meal is just lower yield
Excess nitrogen does run off and tend to kill the river and marine ecosystems it concentrates in. The problem is aggravated by industrial amounts of fertilizer.
Many of the nutrients in the soil in regenerative organic come from growing beneficial plants in rotation over a period of years. The practices improve soil quality to the point where additional nitrogen does not need to be added in bulk to the soil. They literally do not dump large amounts of nitrogen on the soil in a regenerative organic system. They have other ways to make sure the soil has the nutrients it needs.
A regenerative organic farming system and a chemical intensive farming process have many differences. Regenerative is not just "chemical intensive farming but with organic chemicals".
An additional issue is that a good fraction of 'organic nitrogen fertilizer' comes in the form of fish meal. This isn't a very environmentally friendly or sustainable approach, however - e.g. at peak extraction, 2/3 of sardine fishery production on the US west coast was being converted into crop fertilizer (mid 20th century).
Note however that modern industrial agriculture uses fertilizer fairly inefficiently, and a large fraction just runs off the fields into waterways. Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference, by crawling up and down farm fields and selectively applying fertilizer to individual plants as needed (while also removing weeds and treating pest infestations). Of course, this doesn't make agrichemical producers all that happy as it could greatly reduce demand.
You don't need robots -- tractors already drive up and down the field, and the cost of the tractor is many times the annual cost of the worker, BTW -- you just need good application. Which is something farmers already attempt to do. Because why would you waste your $$ on bad deployment of expensive fertilizer? (Or pesticide, etc.)
Your point about spray nozzles is a great one. Not many people realize how difficult it is to make such a small and seemingly unimportant component work well and reliably.
In my hydroponics system, spray nozzles are one of the more expensive (for the size and purpose) components and they fail the most often. You’d think a brass nozzle would last years, but it’s going to need to be disassembled and cleaned before a year is up. Now imagine a huge tractor with high pressure bars that are lined with dozens of nozzles operating in a dirty environment and moving huge volumes of fluid. You’re going to get clogs, you’re going to have to clean them, and the application will be non-ideal quite often if you don’t. And that’s just the nozzles.
This stuff is so much harder and more complicated than it seems on the surface. Adding automation almost makes it harder because you really do want a human observing the system and ensuring it’s actually working.
Because a basic pattern isn't easy to obtain. If there is wind it will blow your spray around. If there is dirt in the nozzle that changes your pattern (until you clean it - but now you need to check if it needs to be cleaned). Sprayer booms can be 130 feet (40 meters) long, and sprayers go over the field fairly fast: those booms are bouncing all over the place and that is changing the pattern. Which is worse - too much chemical on a given section of ground or too much - depending your answer (which will change for different chemicals!) sometimes you want the nozzles to overlap the next and other times now. What is the viscosity of the chemical - this changes the spray pattern. How much chemical do you spray - a low quantity through a high flow nozzle will just drip, while a high quantity through a low flow nozzle isn't possible. Do you want to spray the just ground, just the plants, or both - maybe you can get a nozzle focused on this. Soil is not consistent across a field, so farmers normally apply different amounts of chemical in different sections.
The above is not a complete list of all the nozzle considerations I know of (I work for John Deere, but I don't speak for them), it is what I can remember in a couple minutes.
Would it be possible to estimate viscosity using a calibrated pump and some kind of “time to spray” test (in which a specific amount of force is used to express the fluid through a nozzle), then use that viscosity measurement to set the pressure for the spray to get more consistent results?
Or does that make absolutely no sense? I’m not sure how you can reliably measure fluid properties in order to get consistent spray patterns. It seems like it would be useful here, though.
Yes, and there is manual calibration to do that sometimes. (Iirc for sprayers most chemicals are 99% water so the factory does that, but planters often do have a process where you dump seed for a minute and then measure what came out). However you still need different nozzles for different fluid rates.
No need, farmers can repair. What they can't to is change emissions or steel parts. So long as you are doing the regular repair work farmers do there is no problem. When you do things beyond that things get hard.
There all sorts of things that affect coverage. These things are done by booms with nozzles at all sorts of different points, and there's variables like pressure variance at different points in the pipes, spray radius per nozzle type, turning radius / position of the tractor, relative height of the boom to the crop / ground at different points, etc.
And it's not just fertilizer, but other sprays, too.
Here, this looks thoroughly boring, but this guy is going over configuring one of our systems for fertilizer application... You can get an idea of some of the variables involved, if you can make it through :-)
>Here is where the AI robots could make a big difference
Usually when someone says "AI will save the world because" it is followed by a bunch of naive hyperbole.
However, you are 100% right. A few robust robots with an AI to spot pests and poor nutrition could decimate input costs for a farm and solve several environmental issues in one go.
The reason chemical pest control and broadly spraying fertilizer on the top of fields are a thing is that they have low labor costs. You'd get more efficacy if you walked the field and removed pests by hand or sprayed fertilizer only where you need it.
It's the simple reason why a well-tended garden produces better produce than a corporate farm. There is simply more effort per plant in a garden. Tractors are currently too dumb to treat plants individually. They require plants to emerge, grow, harvest at the same time, and in the same way. Current modalities for pests/nutrition treat plants at the field level, not at the individual level. This creates lots of waste and externalities.
If there were a robustly built robot smart enough to deal with plant issues in and individual way then there is a huge slice of efficiency that could be gained. A field with the productivity of a garden. People have been trying to create this for a decade now and the limiting factor is the software. Maybe with the latest round of AI advances that will change.
yes, however now, we have soil turned to sand and really aggressive nitrogen run off because it doesn't pay to manage the soil properly.
In the Netherlands, they have so much shit, that its limiting how much cattle they can produce (because of laws about nitrogen runoff.)
Now the soil is fucked, it doesn't absorb water. That means that not only does it dry out quicker, it means that it can't generate rain as much, which means more drought, and higher temperatures. Worse still, because it can't absorb as much water, you get worse flooding.
Farming needs swales, ground cover, mixed planting and shite. lots of shite.
You can absolutely have too much of it in one place even though it is useful. Large hog farms produce so much manure that they have problems getting rid of it all. The big problem is that it costs too much to haul and the feed is trucked in. Ideally the feed trucks would leave with manure to take back to where the feed comes from to use as fertilizer but of course that isn't in any way economical. It does work in some situations though like a lot of dairies where they pump the storage pits into tanks and spray or inject it back into the feedstock fields.
Manure is a hazardous material and must not be hauled in the same trailer that hauls animal food. You can truck manure around, but it can't use the same trucks and trailers as was used to get the food to the animal.
It’s not nearly so dire because the majority of farmland isn’t raising crops for direct human consumption. 40% of US corn is turned into ethanol and the majority of the remainder is used to feed livestock who burn calories by exiting.
In the event of a major disaster most of the existing livestock would be slaughtered and a significant percentage of biofuel/animal feed would be converted for human consumption. It’s less palatable than sweet corn, but vastly better than starvation.
Longer term you get different crops and even a return to things like crop rotation. Meanwhile people would be extremely motivating to get alternatives working.
Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal food chain).
Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.
Yes, the world did not respond neatly to a shortage of toilet paper. In the event of a shortage of animal-based protein, I would expect the response would be worse than the toilet paper wars.
A large percentage of the TP shortage was a change in form factor as offices/restaurants generally used a different supply chain than people do. I saw plenty of stores stacking “office” style giant roles of TP in random cardboard packages which made a real impact in aggregate.
I expect people would do similar things in a real food shortage. If your starving buying a 5 gallon bucket of feed corn from the back of some guy’s truck suddenly looks appealing as do dog biscuits etc.
The TP shortage was most definitely exacerbated by some people buying 1000x as much just to be able to resell it at a profit. So I agree, if meats were in shortage you would see similar attempts (even though it's illegal) and worse - the hoarding would result in spoilage exacerbating it even further.
Yes, though the rotation in most of the midwest etc is mainly just corn -> soy -> corn -> soy with the exception of some places that might toss in sorghum or wheat in there, too, depending on climate.
Somewhat, with modern agriculture you only get ~9-15% boost in total yields from a corn/soy rotation long term, but that’s often offset by differences in commodity prices.
Without fertilizers and especially pesticides the gains can be much larger though it forces investments into a wider range of equipment.
They're just annual crops and already on a rotation. Nobody would be eating livestock field corn or soy. It'd just get plowed under and replaced with wheat or flour corn or something else. Likely whatever worked with existing equipment and supply chains in the area.
I think the point was without artificial fertilizer there would be famine everywhere all the time. But it is absolutely true that while necessary a nitrogen source fertilizer isn’t sufficient to produce food.
That running out was also the reason for ww2. As empires could not be trusted on free trade and thus any non empire was one trade crisis away from starvation with haber Bosch. Thus the various "economic independence" aka autarky movements by non colonial powers that became monstrous programs for medieval like farming.
What exactly were the hunters from Hunter-Gatherer's hunting if it was not meat?
Isn't the poor health with the switch explained by the lack of food diversity?
Also, wouldn't there be less meat availability after the switch from hunter-gatherer as your population grows and your crop/planting efforts grow but animal husbandry did not scale at the same pace.
Hundreds of millions of people in India and around the world are just fine without meat, it’s not like we have to eat it. Could even be better for us not to.
Even if hundreds of millions of people in India do not eat meat, ghee and milk – both animal products – are a key part of the Indian diet. Moreover, quite a lot of those Indians eschewing meat will still eat eggs, such that restaurants have to use the term "pure vegetarian" to disambiguate.
There is an extremely high correlation between eating meat and poorer health outcomes. You can find studies where meat is better or being vegan or vegetarian looks worse, but on balance, it appears that limiting meat intake (little to none) points to better health outcomes.
Nutrition is complicated. It could be that impulsive eaters or people who make poor eating decisions rarely exclude meat from their diet, and the issue isn’t the meat so much as the rest of their diet or the sheer volume of what they eat.
In any case, there isn’t any compelling data to eat meat other than “it tastes good”. Unless you live on subsistence farming and a goat eating grass you can’t eat is an essential source of food for you.
Might be simplifying things too much in general, but for the layperson it's not horrible advice - just a bit of everything, without going into excess. Some grains, veggies, fruits and berries, probably some dairy products, eggs/fish/meat occasionally too, at least for the folks for whom a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle would be be difficult.
Personally, I have both lactose free milk and plant based alternatives sometimes (there's a rice drink that I like, but oat/almond varieties are okay), some cheese (also the cottage variety) and meat sometimes, though mostly chicken instead of something like beef. In equal measure if not more, I also choose plant based alternatives too, like bean/pea/spinach burger patties, or just dishes without meat sometimes. A bit of fat, a bit of sugar, albeit limiting sugary drinks and processed foods somewhat.
Bloodwork seems fine so far, also losing a little bit of weight gradually to improve BMI, maybe should slightly lower cholesterol because it's towards the upper end of a healthy reference interval. Although I will say that sometimes there's definitely a pronounced sense of hunger, even though I've had enough food, which is annoying.
Pretty sure that when we're discussing the othering of certain humans by classifying them as "subspecies", India is not a good topic to bring to the table.
I'd argue that the increase occurred earlier. Everything we're learning about other human species is showing they also had intelligence and were around before Erectus came to be.
History tidbit: before the Haber process was discovered, most commercial fertilizer was calcium cyanamide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_cyanamide) as a downstream product from calcium carbide – one of the first industrial chemistry processes.
In the late 1800s - early 1900s this was done along many riverside cities in Eastern US and Canada, because of cheap hydro power generated by dams.
Don't know why you're being downvoted when you have provided the answer.
"In their search for a new process for producing cyanides for cyanide leaching of gold, Frank and Caro discovered the ability of alkaline earth carbides to absorb atmospheric nitrogen at high temperatures."
Nitrogen is obtained either by fractional distillation of liquid air, or by means of the copper oxide process. In the latter, air is passed through a red-hot mass of finely divided copper, suspended in asbestos or other inert material. The copper combines with the oxygen and allows the nitrogen to pass through. The copper oxide is easily recovered for use by reduction in situ with a suitable gas, such as natural gas.
The nitrogen used must be pure and dry, otherwise, at high temperatures, there is destruction of the carbon pencils, and of calcium carbide, according to the following reactions ...
I wonder how much more expensive this process is than the conventional approach.
Apparently 'five times as expensive' according to Vaclav Smil (who is very pessimistic about rapid decarbonization) in How the World Works (2022):
> In terms of the second category, as I will detail in the next chapter, synthesis of the ammonia needed to produce nitrogenous fertilizers now depends heavily on natural gas as the source of hydrogen. Hydrogen could be produced by the decomposition (electrolysis) of water instead, but this route remains nearly five times as expensive as when the element is derived from abundant and inexpensive methane — and we have yet to create a mass-scale hydrogen industry.
Also how many years of fertilizer and storage could be purchased for the price of all that manufactured equipment? And what are the carbon dioxide emissions from its production and transport? How does all this compare to the carbon footprint and effectiveness of something like regenerative organic farming, which does not typically require inputs of synthetic fertilizers? For the cost of one of these plants, how much equipment could a farmer purchase to aid in a transition to regenerative organic practices. What are the relative effects on waterways between the two approaches, over the subsequent 10 year period?
The phrasing is odd - is methane more abundant and less expensive than water? I get the subtext that there’s something else in the process that drives cost, but at least in that out of context quote it isn’t obvious what it is. I would assume it’s electricity, however using solar which has a lifespan of 25+ years seems like it obviates that.
Milorganite is exactly that, it's composed of heat-dried microbes that have digested the organic material in wastewater. It's manufactured by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, which captures waste water from the metropolitan Milwaukee area and uses naturally occurring microbes to digest the nutrients. After the organic matter has been consumed, the cleaned water is returned to Lake Michigan and the resulting material is dried and marketed as Milorganite®.
The problem with human waste is the concentration of heavy metals as I understand it. We are the very top of the food chain and we accumulate all of the heavy metals from below which then gets further concentrated in our dried waste.
It may come as a surprise to people (it certainly was a surprise to me), but actually there was a quite substantial renewable ammonia industry in the past in some countries, e.g. in Iceland and Norway. It eventually couldn't compete against cheap fossil gas though...
This is actually exciting. Converting carbon free energy (such as solar and wind) into chemical energy is I think one of the more promising approaches. One of the big challenges of solar and wind is matching instantaneous supply with instantaneous demand.
By converting it to chemical energy, you can basically take the solar output that you get and use it. If you get more, you produce more, if you get less, you produce less. It is adaptable to the supply.
Seriously. My mom told me that cow shit that were accumilating in places they were were picked up in a wagon and carried to a designated place to place livestock shit and maybe cover it with something organic (would still smell bad) and leave it there for some time so that shit turn into dirt, soil or something that can be used as fertilizer. I don't remember how long it has to stay before it becomes fertilizer.
Humanure is great except for all the pharmaceuticals we put in our bodies and other junk that goes down the drain. A lot of the pharmaceuticals do not break down in our bodies nor in the soil. People dump a lot of random stuff into the sewer system. Why put that on the fields where we grow our food?
From a first principles perspective, would I be able to grow enough food for me from the waste fertiliser from me? my intuition is that there wouldn't be enough
There is a reason dairy farmers have to buy fertilizer.
Most dairy farms are very efficient at collecting all the waste the cows produce. They then empty the pits into a tanker truck and spray/inject it onto the fields. It goes a long way and helps complete the cycle, but your intuition is right, it alone is not enough.
Depends on many factors. If you are growing all your food on 1000 acres (only food for you, not selling any for cash) you can do this, and your decedents can continue until the earth/sun dies (assuming your family doesn't increase in size which is the normal thing to happen). If you are trying to do the same on 10 square feet you have a much more intensive operation and probably need fertilizer because not all processes are 100% efficient.
Some of the nitrogen in your waste won't make it back to the plants. There are other micro nutrients that plants need that won't make it back either.
Kenya has an amazing run in economic growth over the years. The key was their heavy investment in agriculture and related technologies. With food security, the other aspects of the economy simply flourish.
This approach (eliminating fossil fuels from the nitrogen fertilizer pipeline) will inevitably become the global norm. For Africa in particular, it's the only plausible route to long-term food stability as there simply isn't enough fossil fuel available to allow Africa to industrialize (and if there was, we'd be doubling the rate of CO2 increase in the atmosphere). Africa has the opportunity to go directly from pre-industrial agrarian economy to a renewable energy-powered industrial economy.
For those interested in farming and inputs to farming, I recommend looking into "No-Till" farming and other regenerative soil building practices. What is being rediscovered is how much cheaper it is to build soil health, which in a few years brings yields up to conventional ag. Methods such as increased soil organic matter through cover crops, reduced tillage to keep mycorrhizal fungi, microbes, and earth worm trails intact. These practices are being shown by ag research universities in the US to greatly reduce the need for inputs (fertilizer) almost entirely in many cases. That is because the bioavailability of nutrients is far higher when plants work with beneficial microbes to acquire nutrients - the way plants evolved was not in tilled soil. And tilled soil becomes hardened and erodes, while untilled or lightly subsoiled earth allows moisture retention and deeper water penetration. While not a rejection of modern ag practices, no-till does take aim at some of the conventional expensive "wisdom" (namely, tillage, heavy fertilizer use, heavy pesticide+herbicide use).
Modern ag is all no-till and low-till and has been since the 1980s. The old fashioned plow is non-existent anymore. Even when a farmer does till, it is a with a tool that is rarely even called a plow (there are several types of tillage tools in common use with different properties, but none turn the soil over or exchange soil layers)
Modern ag can build topsoil - sometimes at rates as high as 1mm/year!
It's using solar energy as input, where's the fossil fuels?
This development is exciting and hopefully spreads everywhere. Farmers being able to make their own fertilizer (at least on the nitrogen side), is a huge win.
The Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened without the Agricultural Revolution that preceded and accompanied it, freeing up workers for industry.
In medieval times most of the population were farmers by necessity. In the UK, output per acre tripled and the proportion of the population in farming went from 60% to 20% in 1840. And the UK was still almost entirely self sufficient at this time, food imports only became substantial in the late 1800s.
Similar changes happened across Europe, though timing varied by country with the spread of industrialisation.
The biosphere seemed to scale quite a bit before we invented synthetic fertilizers. I don't think it's so much a problem of composting not scaling as much as our supply chains being wasteful and linear.
Again, not commenting on the merits of this technology, I just think it's not correct to say that composting can't scale.
Farmers have been able to do this for a very long time, but the process is very inefficient and messy when done at scale. Certainly these are good strides forward though!
This says more about the industry than about solar panels, you could say this about any product. There isn't anything inherently carbon-intensive about solar panel production.
And if you compare the distribution of these solar panels with the distribution of the equivalent amount of nitrogen produced, I bet the panels require a lot less carbon for transportation. Not to mention not relying on a nitrogen producer (Russia), and additional uses for the panels.
While that is true, it is misleading. If you can use a fixed quantity of fossil fuels to generate many decades of carbon free energy, the change to the overall lifecycle carbon requirements are very different.
Just like in algorithms, making it an O(1) rather than O(n) solution, even with a large constant factor, can make an enormous difference over time.
Fair point! I don't think transportation, manufacture, or extraction ultimately require fossil fuels. Most of the energy inputs are fungible between fossil fuel or renewable. I agree with you right now but that is not a permanent role for fossil fuels. I think input processing (redox) and plastics will be the most persistent. But overall non haber-bosch ammonia is going to reduce co2 emissions and should be celebrated.
While in principle I agree fossil fuels aren't required, in practice it is much more difficult to convert transportation, manufacture and extraction than most realize
Also suspect modern agriculture's conviction that the crop is an empty vessel requiring synthetic fertilizer is long overdue for reconsideration. Organic ag can be as productive as industrial ag, at far less energy/materials cost, but it will require much more human effort. While this is a very serious tradeoff to make I would argue it is worthwhile in the long run.
Only if it isn't treated carefully. Spray it on in fall after harvest and you are probably fine. however spray right before harvest and pathogens will still be alive. a month before harvest is often when plants need the most nutrients, and that isn't enough time for any pathogens to die.
The other comment is probably right, that this varies widely, but getting a vague order of magnitude is still useful. From some amateur googling, it seems that an acre requires on the order of 100 lbs/year (50-300lbs, though the higher figures seem to also include things other than just nitrogen/ammonia).
So 1 ton/day (assuming metric tonnage), would be in the range of 8000 acres/year, though with obviously large error bars.
depends on the soil, current crop and the previous crop, ground cover.
For example, farmers grow beans/legumes because they are nitrogen fixers. This reduces the need for fertilisers later on. However does mean that you might bot be able to grow as profitable crop in that time.
Soil health also comes into it. An allotment will be a shittone more productive per unit area than high grade arable land
When I read articles like this, I can totally understand China and India's argument as to why they won't or don't prioritize fossil fuel consumption.
The West has spent centuries modernizing itself to the point where there is a vast gap between the West and the rest of the world. Now that the West has a huge advantage, they want to start imposing moral arguments on the 3rd world nations as to why they should abide by the West's new set of moral codes, which handcuff the progress that 3rd world countries can make.
This feels like another example of where I bet it would be cheaper to do it in other ways (besides using Russian ammonia) but they decided to try the "green" way. It also feels a lot like how Monsanto tricked Indian farmers into using their seeds which required Roundup and then became indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the financial handcuffs put on them.
So I can completely sympathize why many poorer countries can see all these environmental moral edicts as being ways to keep them oppressed and tricked into not making progress independently from the West.
> The West has spent centuries modernizing itself to the point where there is a vast gap between the West and the rest of the world.
The West has spent centuries inventing and iterating on technology which is now available to the rest of the world, and has experienced how environmental hazards are created, which we want to avoid repeating.
The West also handcuffs itself with environmental morality (see infrastructure development in China vs the US). We have experience with pollution and want to avoid countries and continents of 1b+ people making the Earth uninhabitable.
>It also feels a lot like how Monsanto tricked Indian farmers into using their seeds which required Roundup and then became indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the financial handcuffs put on them.
I think it's actually the exact opposite of this. The farm now has a fertilizer factory that produces fertilizer for free. They are no longer reliant on buying ammonia from big companies.
All it takes to change that opinion is to spend a few winter days out in the smog-choked capital of India. That had quickly built an appreciation in me for even the current state of pollution controls in the West, where the air getting that bad is considered 'historic' (eg the Canadian wildfire smoke that passed through NY back in June).
You can buy non patented seeds if you want to. there is a reason modern farmers buy form Monsanto (and competitors): hybrid corn yields a lot more crops - but the seeds don't breed true so you need special seed corn fields which need to be carefully managed.
There is a reason farmers use roundup as well: the other option to kill weeds is run a hoe through the field - which uses a lot more expensive fuel (read CO2!)
