Illustration by Yuko Kondo
By Jon BirgerMarc Albertsen, the Director of research bespectacled, aged 62 years at Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont (DD) seed development unit, was catching up on paperwork one morning in July 2007, when he received a call from an assistant, Sharon Cerwick. "Marc," Cerwick said, "" you would be better come here and see this. ""
Cerwick had been in the area, literally, inspecting the experimental corn planted next to the headquarters of the pioneer in Johnston, Iowa). Corn has been genetically modified by Albertsen and his colleagues in the hope of reaching a new stroke: a more efficient use of nitrogen. It is at the top of the list of wishes of corn producers, because the cost of fertilizer ammonium nitrate has soared to $450 per tonne, up to 130% since 2002. Albertsen and other scientists from seed have tried to build stems of nitrogen-effective for at least five years, but their supercorn is still far from 5 to 10 years. "You speak of our Holy Grail," explains Pamela Johnson, Member of the Council National Corn Growers Association (NCGA) with 1,200 acres of Floyd, Iowa.
In the field, Albertsen was found a row of corn whose leaves were affected by a v-shape yellowing, the eloquent sign of nitrogen deficiency. The other line - plants which had been designed for the efficiency of nitrogen - was green and prosperous. Both had been planted in the severely deficient soil nitrogen, but plants genetically seemed unaffected.
Seedlings of malnutrition recalled the past Albertsen: sickly ranks, he saw as a boy on his family farm near Danbury, Iowa). Healthy, growing in the same tired soil, talks about the future. He immediately telephoned to his team in Woodland, California, where Pioneer was running a similar trial in central California farmland and asked them to check their seedlings. "Even today, it gives me goose bumps," he said. "Their field checks are returned with the same results."
Other than the water and the Sun, there is nothing more important to the culture of corn - most valuable crop in the U.S., more than 66 billion in 2010 - than nitrogen. Generous applications of fertilizer nitrogen are essential for the bushel of 180 to 200 - a - yield acres that have become commonplace in large States such as the Iowa and Illinois farm, double that farmers produced 35 years, according to the U.S. Agriculture Dept. wheat and rice in the world farmers saw yields plateau; corn is the only high culture for which per acre production continues to increase.
This extraordinary productivity comes with a price economic and environmental. Nitrogen fertilizer is the largest or the second large fees for most American farmers, said Rod Williamson, Director of research at the Iowa Corn Growers Assn. V. The average cost of 60 cents per pound, the 150 pounds of nitrogen that farmers over each of the acres 90 million U.S. corn fields correspond to a bill of eight billion dollars per year.
More difficult to quantify, but not less expensive is that the runoff of fertilizer damage to aquatic life. More than half of American farmers fertilizer to apply to the corn gets wasted. Some of them leaching in aquifers, local pollution of drinking water. More it ends in the runoff of rain water, flowing into streams and rivers that feed the Bay Chesapeake, the Mississippi River and other ecosystems. The Mississippi river runoff finish in the Gulf of Mexico, where it dynamically generates algal blooms fatal fly the oxygen of fish and plants. The Gulf today is home to the second Ocean dead zone, according to a study prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency and USDA scientific and 2010 are still debating which was more damaging - the year oil spill last BP (BP) or permanent agriculture of the United States nitrogen pollution.
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