Why Fertilizing Plants Matters
Why do farmers and gardening enthusiasts use fertilizers? This seems like a no-brainer, but one that is less frequently addressed than it should be.
For starters, all the nutrients in food come from the soil. Creating healthy crops and plants means amassing nutrients and working with healthy soil. Soils contain nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, and potassium. Without them, plants suffer from nutrient deficiencies and stop growing, unable to function properly and produce the necessary output.
Image source: PlanetNatural.com
Fertilizers provide plant nutrients – they are exactly the plant nutrients applied to gardens or agricultural fields. They have been used since ancient times. Native Americans had used crude fertilizers such as burying a fish in their corn plots.
Fertilizers are counted on to increase crop yield and improve poor-quality land. Manure improves soil texture, recycles nitrogen, and introduces important bacteria. When pasture is improved, animals are quicker to fatten up, while fertilizing can help reclaim land for pasture once marshland is already drained.
Image source: Philstar.com
Perhaps the most important contribution of fertilizers to the environment, on the other hand, is helping preserve wildlife habitat. Fertilizer use allows farmers to continually achieve high yields on the same land for many years, removing the need to clear new lands. When there is poor fertility, there is loss of topsoil, which makes the field less fertile and therefore leads to poor growth and increased soil exposure to erosion. This vicious cycle ends with land becoming completely unproductive.
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