Why not use nitrogen fixing bacteria on farm fields rather than fertilizer.

 

It’s long been known that we can use bacteria that fix nitrogen as a fertiliser. Plants like legumes use nitrogen fixing bacteria naturally. But using this nitrogen fixing bacteria on all types of crops has a problem because these bacteria only live for a few hours when sprayed on as a fertiliser. Daniel Nocera an energy professor at Harvard University has found a way to make these bacteria live for more than two weeks by putting them under stress so that they store and hoard energy and this helps these microbes last longer in the field. The farmers think and spray this bacterial mix onto the crops in the exactly the same way using the same machinery that they use for a synthetic fertiliser. The microbes don’t get washed away in the same way that the water runs off and as they sense the deficit of nitrogen in the soil around them they start fixing the nitrogen from the air for free and as these microbes die they have also captured carbon which makes the soil healthier as a by product.




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