Hello and welcome to another Fun Fact From Flora ,

Today we are going to have a little look at something that is very important that people don’t tend to know very much about. I"m afraid it’s not good news but I can insert random GIFs of cats interacting with lizards at inappropriate points to ease the journey.

Now we love fertilisers. Plants love fertilisers (some plants at least ).

You might have heard of nitrogen fertilisers — those are quite well known — but you might not know that phosphorus is also a very important fertiliser. Sadly, we are not being very sensible in how we are using that phosphorus (I mean are we ever sensible in our use of planetary resources).

It looks like we only have about 100-300 years of phosphorus left.

Now that’s pretty shocking.

There may be more — as a mineral it is very asymmetrically distributed. It is mostly found in the Sahara and Morocco who then export it out to other countries, but there could be more elsewhere that we don’t know about.

As these supplies start to dwindle we are seeing a huuuuge price spike in phosphorus fertilisers. You know who that’s gonna hit the hardest — developing countries.

To put it in perspective, globally , 10kg of phosphorus are added per hectare of agricultural land.

In Africa that’s only 3kg per hectare.

In Europe it reaches 25kg per hectare.

And what is even more MAD is that only 15-30% of all that phosphorus is actually taken up by plants. In fact, 25% of the 250 GIGATONNES (a gigatonne is 1 trillion kg — just so you know) has ended up in water bodies or landfill.

That’s 62.5 billion tonnes of phosphorus.

The phosphorus content of freshwater GLOBALLY is 75% higher than it was in pre-industrial levels.

This means that globally, only 29% of agricultural land is phosphorus deficient and 71% is actually in a phosphorus surplus.

CROPS THAT HAVE A SURPLUS DON"T NEED MORE PHOSPHORUS. IT"S VERY STABLE IN SOILS (unlike nitrates) but because people don’t know about this they just keep slathering it on like there’s no tomorrow.

Now, the worst part is, as we waste more and more phosphorus it becomes more energy intensive to extract the sources that we still have. This is seriously expensive and with a lot of environmental consequences . To get one tonne of that sweet, sweet fertiliser you need to have 3 tonnes of phosphate rock (that’s the bit you mine out of the ground), then you need 1.4 tonnes of sulfuric acid (nasty stuff) and 11,000 litres of water . It also makes about 5.4 tonnes of phosphogypsum . This material is mostly made up of gypsum (CaSO4 2H2O) which is used a lot in the construction industry. YAY. Finally, something good!! Use it for construction!! Useful by-products!! Oh wait