So, I recently watched a video regarding the first synthesized fertilizer, and I thought it was pretty interesting that farmland was basically screwed if they didn’t figure out how to get more nitrogen into dirt.
But then I thought about it, I was taught that plants make the bulk of themselves out of carbon, which they absorb from the air in carbon dioxide. Why is the same not true with nitrogen? Our atmosphere is a little more than 2/3rds nitrogen after all.
I tried looking it up, but the result was basically “Because nitrogen in the atmosphere is in a gaseous form” but that wasn’t really helpful.
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Nitrogen in the air is in the form of N2 and it rather stable because it has a triple bond between the N atoms. It takes more energy to break the N2 triple bond and bacteria have been selected to do that energy requiring step. It gets broken down in the soil by bacteria in to amino-compounds which are more easily reactive and accessible for the plant. It’s all governed by thermodynamic. For the plant, it is easier to take up N from the soil because it is usually broken in to molecules that are only single bonded to it and N has an extra pair of unpaired electrons that plants access much more easily and with a favorable thermodynamic.
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