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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Imagine nitrogen is like tape, and it’s easy to stick it onto something.
Normally, when you apply tape to something, you can do a little bit of work to remove the tape. But imagine two pieces of tape stuck to each other– Nearly impossible to separate, at least without a lot of very careful work.
The particular form of nitrogen in the air, N2, is two nitrogen atoms stuck together, and like the tape, and they’re very hard to separate.
Many/most plants rely on _nitrogen fixation_, which is a collection of processes for separating the two nitrogen atoms and sticking them to something else that’s easier to for the plant to work with/consume.
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