Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study attacks the practice of using fertiliser to produce high wheat yields for bread, claiming that current use of fertiliser is “unsustainable”, due to the energy required to manufacture the fertiliser.
How to reduce the environmental impact of a loaf of bread? (Update)
With an estimated 12 million loaves sold in the UK every day, bread remains a staple of the British diet. In a groundbreaking study researchers from the University of Sheffield have now calculated the environmental impact of a loaf of bread and which part of its production contributes the most greenhouse gas.
…
Dr Liam Goucher, N8 Agrifood Research Fellow from the University of Sheffield who carried out the study, said: “Consumers are usually unaware of the environmental impacts embodied in the products they purchase – particularly in the case of food, where the main concerns are usually over health or animal welfare.
“There is perhaps awareness of pollution caused by plastic packaging, but many people will be surprised at the wider environmental impacts revealed in this study.
“We found in every loaf there is embodied global warming resulting from the fertiliser applied to farmers’ fields to increase their wheat harvest. This arises from the large amount of energy needed to make the fertilizer and from nitrous oxide gas released when it is degraded in the soil.”
…
“The findings raise a very important issue – whose responsibility is it to bring about the implementation of these interventions: the fertiliser manufacturer, the farmer, the retailer or the consumer?
“There is a growing recognition for a range of industrial processes of the notion of extended producer responsibility – the producer being responsible for downstream impact, expanded to the idea of shared producer and consumer responsibility. The consumer is key, whether being persuaded to pay more for a greener product or by applying pressure for a change in practice.”
…
Co-author Professor Duncan Cameron, Co-director of the P3 Centre for Translational Plant and Soil Science explains: “The fertiliser problem is solvable – through improved agronomic practices”.
“These harness the best of organic farming combined with new technologies to better monitor the nutritional status of soils and plants and to recycle waste and with the promise of new wheat varieties able to utilise soil nitrogen more efficiently”.
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2017-02-environmental-impact-loaf-bread.html
The abstract of the study;
The environmental impact of fertilizer embodied in a wheat-to-bread supply chain
Liam Goucher, Richard Bruce, Duncan D. Cameron, S. C. Lenny Koh & Peter Horton
Food production and consumption cause approximately one-third of total greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore delivering food security challenges not only the capacity of our agricultural system, but also its environmental sustainability. Knowing where and at what level environmental impacts occur within particular food supply chains is necessary if farmers, agri-food industries and consumers are to share responsibility to mitigate these impacts. Here we present an analysis of a complete supply chain for a staple of the global diet, a loaf of bread. We obtained primary data for all the processes involved in the farming, production and transport systems that lead to the manufacture of a particular brand of 800 g loaf. The data were analysed using an advanced life cycle assessment (LCA) tool, yielding metrics of environmental impact, including greenhouse gas emissions. We show that more than half of the environmental impact of producing the loaf of bread arises directly from wheat cultivation, with the use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer alone accounting for around 40%. These findings reveal the dependency of bread production on the unsustainable use of fertilizer and illustrate the detail needed if the actors in the supply chain are to assume shared responsibility for achieving sustainable food production.
Read more: http://www.nature.com/articles/nplants201712
Sadly the full study is paywalled. But in a world where millions of people are still on the edge of starvation, and where millions more have only just gained access to the benefits of modern fertiliser, talking about restrictions, shared responsibility and presumably financial penalties to make fertiliser less accessible in my opinion is unconscionable.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Just as well i eat toast instead of bread I’m doing my bit to save the environment haha
Children, childish thinking beyond belief. and that these people have not only the ears of our (equally brain-dead) leaders, they are teaching future generations this garbage.
Lord of the Flies comes to mind and responses here amplify that thought.
Wheat starch, when processed (ground up and cooked) is killing us, with obesity, heart disease diabetes etc
Wheat protein (gluten) is driving our immune systems crazy to the extent our own bodies is/are attacking themselves.
Stray fragments of this alien protein muck (the bits not picked up by the immune system) are clogging up our brains – causing dementia.
Wheat was/is NOT a staple, it was/is intended as a stop-gap until something properly nutritious came along – like a bison, pig or chicken.
Another major problem with wheat is that it panders our reward system, eating it makes us feel good, warm, cosy, happy, fuzzy and sleepy.
JUST LIKE EVERY ADDICTIVE DRUG IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE DOES.
Hence why nobody wants to stop eating it and why they become so defensive whenever their ‘supply’ is endangered. Even for entirely the wrong reasons. Cause & effect are utterly mangled yet again and wheat is the thing causing the confusion, by switching off large chunks of our thinking abilities. It is a depressant, that’s what depressants do.
Here’s something awkward for us all to think about..
If nitrogen fertiliser is so wonderful, why do N American farmers crow about themselves and make such a huge fuss if/when they yield 2 tonnes per acre.
If a farmer here in the UK grew that much, he’d not only be dead from embarrassment but be entirely out of business. Overnight.
Give that some serious thought, especially when crowing about how CO2 is supposedly ‘greening the planet’
Do you *really* believe it is that simple, adding CO2 to a desert turns it into a garden?
If you do, we are all genuinely fooked, for the reasons I came in with.
Ploughs are gonna kill billions more people than swords ever did.
PS If the best you can do is attack the messenger (me in this case), it really is Lord of the Flies – we are fooked^n, where n is any positive number larger than 2
That’s some weapons grade derp right thar, Pete.
Teff has none of those issues.
maybe not, but its a right shit to harvest! and per plant the actual crop yield is? not much.
im trying to grow quinoa, yeah itsa tough plant low inputs, but..finding a way to harvest without losing it and to get it cleaned is a whole nother drama.
and the entire wheat gluten thing is…another bit of insanity
look more to the idiotic process of glyphosate spray to drop leaves for machinery heading ease and the residues on all the grain from that.
roundup residues are the most likely cause of the surge in IB and other issues.
funny theyve soared as roundup use has?
It’s a staple in Ethiopia like wheat for bread for us here in Aus. Maybe soil composition affects production, I do know it’s so expensive now in Ethiopia that people are going hungry, I can see another “Live Aid” in the coming years.
When you present no facts known to any form of science, we can’t refute your article, so all that is left is ridiculing you for being a mind numbed no nothing who seems to afraid of it’s own shadow.
Of course MarkW never presents which is why I ridicule him. He also does not seem to know much and has little life experience that he will share.
Furthermore MarkW is wrong, facts were presented.
I happen to disagree with the how the LCA methods were applied to determine the facts.
As it happens, I am an expert of on the use of LCA. For example, a proper use of LCA might be to compare potato bread to wheat bread.
It should also be noted that this research has already been done. So long ago that my copies came from micro fiche at the university library pre-internet.
As others have noted, properly processed animal waste is excellent fertilizer. Biosolids (aka sewage sludge) is shipped over the mountains from rainy Seattle to semi-arid Yakima valley. It is used on marginal farm land to grow such things as wheat and feed corn. If there was a problem, the demand exceeded the supply by a large margin.
When I was looking at the results, I suggested that it might make an interesting research topic of the local university. I was told that farmers do not trust the university.
Poor Kit, it must really burn your britches that I’m permitted by this site to have opinions that differ from yours.
Of course having your own personal troll means that you have become one of the elite of comment-dom.
So thank you so very much Kit, and please continue following me around and doing nothing more than whine that you don’t like what I have to say.
BTW, I haven’t commented, even once on the use of sewage as fertilizer.
Not that Kit actually bothers to read what I’ve written. Personal trolls never do.
One final comment, if you count the indents, I am quite clearly responding to Peta and his ramblings about wheat killing us all. Not to the the original piece.
See what happens when you allow hatred of others to interfere with your ability to think. You end up making a fool of yourself.
Again.
Wheat is arguably the most successful biological organisms on the planet. It has convinced a dominant species to transition it from an annoying weed to one of the most common plants on the planet.
We like to think that we are the smart and most dominant species on the planet — but, we are just the tools used to increase the dominance of wheat. Wheat is our overlord. As such, your master is angry at your expression of contempt.
Remember that in the UK we are enslaved by the Climate Change Act 2008, inflicted on us by an NGO fundraiser and a hapless Marxist wonk who woke up one day to find he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Mitigation of climate change is compulsory. This piece of work from Sheffield is therefore welcome, as it will be used to smack the faces of the food fascists (vegans and vegetarians all) who seek to undermine the utilisation of grassland in the UK to produce prime quality beef, dairy and lamb.
In defence of my alma mater, science is meant to be disinterested.
It is meant to follow through to conclusions without being influenced by other motives, like ethics or morality.
And, in calling for less food in the world, these researchers have clearly avoided those traps.
M Courtney March 3, 2017 at 2:11 am “In defence of my alma mater, science is meant to be disinterested.
It is meant to follow through to conclusions without being influenced by other motives, like ethics or morality.”
Put that another way, scientists engaging in political behavior in their disciplines always characterize it as “apolitical” or a “pure search for truth.”
If you want to grow stuff like a lawn, a garden or a crop, you are going to need nitrogen fertilizer. I mean if you want to grow stuff well.
Lightning only does so much and your plants want more of it.
The issue is that within a year or two, the bacteria in the soil convert that nitrogen into N2O and it gets released to the atmosphere. That is why your soil and your plants can use some extra once or twice a year. ALL soils.
While having a small overall impact, N2O is the fourth biggest GHG behind H2O, CO2, and CH4 and it is increasing at roughly the same rate as CO2. It is the price we have to pay to grow stuff well and its overall impact is not big enough to worry about versus the benefits.
While I think it is ridiculous to think any CAGW is baked into the cake from petro-fertilizers, I do think “productivity growth” associated with the industrial revolution is overstated when productivity is measured in terms of human input only. What does it take to feed us now, compared to a century or two ago? Say conservatively, 5% of the manpower is needed compared to what used to be required. Invert that 5% and productivity is now 20x what it used to be. But that is not because humans have become more productive, it is because human effort has been replaced by other inputs that are more productive. If those inputs are measured in some kind of caloric basis and compared to output on a caloric basis, productivity growth is much less. We get more calories out of an acre of some crop because we’re expending more calories to produce the fertilizer, combines, and whatever to get that yield increase. Has there been any study that actually tries to measure productivity this way? I wouldn’t be surprised if productivity has not increased at all. We’re just using up finite resources faster.
I’m not saying that is bad at all. We’re far from running out of finite resources. I’m just saying that I don’t think modern economics has a handle on this. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was trying to think along these lines, and I think was right in the direction he was heading, even if there were some flaws in the physical basis of his economic theory.
There is a field of study that considers a metric called Energy Return on Investment (EROI). This is essentially the sum of energy outputs from a process divided by the sum of the energy inputs — basically the energy efficiency of producing new energy. There is a related metric for crops called Edible Energy Efficiency (EEE). Today, fossil fuels deliver EROIs of about 20:1 for refined petroleum fuels, to 80:1 for thermal coal, to even higher for Marcellus Shale fracked natural gas. Agricultural EEE returns are about 2:1, down from about 5:1 at the turn of the 20th century, while the yields per acre of corn are up by a factor of 6 and of wheat by a factor of 3 over this time. Modern intensively cultivated agriculture steals high-EROI energy from fossil fuels to improve crop yields. Natural gas provides fertilizer, pesticides, and processing plant heat energy. Coal provides processing plant electricity and heat. Petroleum fuels the cultivation and harvesting and transportation machinery. About 80% of the energy in U.S. corn ethanol is fossil fuel, only 20% photosynthesis, when traced back through the lifecycle. There is a catch-22 for modern agriculture: the more fossil fuel energy is used to boost yields, the lower the EEE.
So the short answer to your question is that the overall productivity of food agriculture has fallen. The same amount of solar energy illuminates each acre today as in 1900, but each acre produces much more crop from that acre because of massive inputs of fossil fuel energy. The proportional increase in food yield is less than the proportional increase in total energy inputs, so the EEE has fallen. Organic agriculture will tend to have lower yields and higher EEE.
EROI, not EEE, is the proper metric for biofuels. The EROI for U.S. corn ethanol is less than 2:1. For cellulosic and algae feedstock, it is less than 1:1 — it takes more energy to make them into a decent liquid fuel than exists in that fuel product, so the energy balance is negative and the EROI is upside down. The EROI for algae biodiesel is even worse — less than 1:7. We are far better off to use fossil fuels directly as fuel than to put them into the biofuel lifecycle to cultivate biomass and convert it to fuel. Our overall fuel use and GHG emissions and polluting emissions and water use and land use and environmental impact would fall if we eliminated the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard, returned the 40 million acres being intensively farmed for corn ethanol production back to conservation, and just used straight gasoline instead. Unfortunately, ideology and politics don’t traffic much with math and logic.
Much more information available in this paper http://wici.ca/new/resources/occasional-papers/#no.4 .
Nitrogen is unsustainable? Wow, I thought this was about something real like phosphorus or potassium (potash), which are mined.
Potassium not a problem. Phosphorus coild eventually become one as quality of phosphate deposits declines.
Already answered that scam:
Die Umweltbilanz von Weizenvollkornbrot
Auf den Dünger kommt es an
Wer sich umweltbewusst und nachhaltig ernähren will, der kauft zum Beispiel Fleisch aus der Region oder isst generell weniger oder gar kein Fleisch. Aber wie sieht eigentlich die Umweltbilanz von anderen Lebensmitteln aus, etwa von Brot? Britische Forscher sind dem nachgegangen und kamen zu einem überraschenden Ergebnis.
http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/die-umweltbilanz-von-weizenvollkornbrot-auf-den-duenger.676.de.html?dram:article_id=380085
Was das für Trotteln sind – gerade wegen des CO2 muss ja GEDÜNGT werden :
Nahrungsmittel bestehen aus C O H !
condensed:
What sucks – just for CO2 must be FERTILIZING:
Food consists of C O H!
Artificial nitrogen-manure is force-fed (zwangsernährt) to the plants and a lot of it is just wasted. Properly treated animal-dung feeds the plants naturally and that shows in their health. Lower yields are really no problem if the right system of agriculture and food-processing (as little as possible) is applied. Presently too few big naturally-operating farms work really well enough to be role-models for every farmer; farm-subsidies play a big role in that.
Climate-alarmists try to win the hearts and minds of the organically minded, but, i think, they only win those who mind their bank-account first. The core of the “organics” thinks that all future atmospheric CO2-increase is necessary to re-build the lost humus (CO2 content) in the world’s soils.
They want to keep us in the dark, now they want to starve us…. These people are utterly mad you know.
“Co-author Professor Duncan Cameron, Co-director of the P3 Centre for Translational Plant and Soil Science explains: “The fertiliser problem is solvable – through improved agronomic practices”
I guess Professor Duncan Cameron does not like the “z” in fertilizer.
Or is he talking about something else that doesn’t exist?
We stop using fertilizer. Instead we will just farm twice as many acres.
I’m sure that will decrease the environmental impact of farming.
“improved agronomic practices” is what Lysenkoism was called. The yield of an acre of ‘organically’ grown wheat is less than half of the yield when fertilisersare used. Prepare the masses for their oncoming starvation should such fools get control over food production.
‘These harness the best of organic farming combined with new technologies to better monitor the nutritional status of soils and plants’
More bs and not the crop friendly kind. Modern soil tests are readily available to farmers to identify the nutrients required to grow a good crop. Those same soil tests will show why the organically farmed ground produces so much less grain; the crops are short of nutrients.
Paul Homewood has also covered this story:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/bread-causes-global-warming/
Note that the the lead scientist is described as being from the university’s “Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures”
So absolutely NO chance of the study being impartial, then…
Without fertilizer it would create a food crisis and food shortages. Which fit in with their agenda to reduce the world population. By genocide, which has become the left favorite method of mass murder.
The real key to all of this is choice, the free market. A willing buyer and willing seller will agree on a trade, or walk away and find another offer. Would quickly sort out all this nonsense.
What these people are promoting is my great grandfather’s farming methods. If gramps got 40 bushels of corn per acre he considered it a good crop. Today, that farm routinely produces 165 bu per acre and 180 in the years when corn follows a previous year’s bean crop. You can’t feed 300 million people with my great grandfather’s farming methods.
” You can’t feed 300 million people with my great grandfather’s farming methods.”
Well, you might – if most of those people returned to farming that way… Of course, they wouldn’t get much else done. My mother came from Wisconsin farming people. They did fairly well until the taxes got so high, and after finishing college their children had no interest in the backbreaking work of farming – even with tractors and electric milking machines.
The unsustainable part is in clear cutting forests in the U.S. to ship the wood pellets to the UK for burning while also forcing the workers to consume ethanol fuel from subsidized corn and awarding fat tax credits (not deductions) to elitists for over-priced electric cars and 4x priced rooftop solar. That is all at the expense of other taxpayers, the grid operators, and even competitive utility scale solar developers.
“clear cutting forests in the U.S. ”
There is no reason to think harvesting biomass is not sustainable.
“forcing the workers to consume ethanol fuel from subsidized corn and awarding fat tax credits ”
No one is forced to buy ethanol, it is a mandate not a tax credit, and it is not specific to corn. There is no reason to think harvesting biomass is not sustainable.
@Kit
Every U.S. motorist is forced to buy ethanol. It is force-fed into virtually all gasoline by the EPA RFS blending mandates. It continues to be priced at a 20-60 UScent/gal premium to gasoline on an equal-energy content basis and is costing motorists $8 billion per year in lost MPG, in addition to costing the overall economy much more in accelerated fuel system corrosion, increased VOC and ozone and particulate emissions, increased soil plume and water contamination (same effects as MTBE additive), and elevated fuel prices to cover RINs and RIN fraud.
As to burning trees, changing complex natural forest biomes into cultivated monocultures of pulpwood is environmentally devastating. The Brits deforested themselves making their wood-ship navy, and had to log their colonies for ship timber. Now they are logging the USA for wood pellets to feed to the DRAX. Putting modern civilization’s energy burden back onto the biosphere is retrograde and the opposite of clean and green. It was not sustainable in the past as evidenced by the common pattern of agricultural-age civilizations which deforested themselves out of existence. How can burning trees support the much higher energy intensity of industrial-age civilization?
“Not that Kit actually bothers to read what I’ve written. Personal trolls never do.”
Guilty, I often skip comments with lack of content.
Hug a Kansas farmer. The bread basket of the world. One acre of our wheat devours 17 thousand pounds of Carbon dioxide. It takes lower levels of rain to increase yields when carbon dioxide levels rise.
Three fourths of the atmosphere is Nitrogen so I don’t think we will run out. Our farms allowed cattle to graze on winter wheat until spring. Requires less harvested feed. Cattle fertilizer delivered without a spreader.
Here is the nitrogen cycle
http://www.extension.umn.edu/agriculture/nutrient-management/nitrogen/understanding-nitrogen-in-soils/
Our yacht club worked with area farmers in the lakes water shed and along with minimum tillage practices reduced nitrogen run off which fed the algae bloom in the city’s water supply. Education is solving problems faster than alarmist worry worts can generate crisis.
What is the effect of this (one-time) grazing on yield, or is this wheat sown for forage?
Animals on animal-free farms – that would make CO2-alarmism redundant.
Lucky for us Co2 is FREE.
“Atmospheric CO2 increased 14 percent between 1982 and 2010, coinciding with a “5 to 10 percent increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments,” according to a June 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Geophysical Research Letters. The study stated that the CO2 “fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process” and has created “a greening of the globe over recent decades.”
It’s like a perpetual motion food production machine. LOL…
@Todd Todd
“Every U.S. motorist is forced to buy ethanol. ”
I have heard your your over top rant before. I have never had a problems finding local stations sans ethanol. I have old vehicles and use E10 without a problems for many years. I have a boat that is approaching 40 years old with an inboard engine. I am not having a problem.
My first car was a ’60 Ford Falcon. I am amazed how trouble free fuel systems are on anything manufactured since 1989 are.
What people do when the are against something, they make a long list. As an engineer most are bogus reason but they sound convincing.
As far as trees are concerned, the typical straw man is trotted out. No one is suggesting that trees have to provide all the energy an industrialized society needs. Forest lands are managed and the acreage in trees has been steadily increasing since the ’30s in the US.
We spend part of the winter in Louisiana. I was surprised to learn that wood is the largest ag crop. I am not seeing problem with harvesting trees.
Why didn’t they do this study about ethanol — why bread and not the favorite green gas substitute?
Growing all that corn takes a lot of fertiliser. Why wasn’t that their example?
Bread we need. Ethanol we would be better off without.
Eugene WR Gallun