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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N2 nitrogen in the air is not useful to plants, it needs to first be “fixed” (converted to usable organic forms). Bacteria in the soil do this and so plants have evolved to just obtain their nitrogen from the soil. They could have probably evolved to do it themselves but there was no need as bacteria already did it.
This only becomes a problem when you want to pack more plants into a smaller section of soil and bacteria cant provide enough nitrogen. For the crop yields we get today we need fertilizers to make up for what the soil bacteria cant do.
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