Argentina needs a State policy that encourages fertilization to triple exports

In the week there were three connected festivities. The day of the Rural woman, which in the Neolithic created the agricultural revolution, the day of food that was enhanced with it and that of fertilizers. All three are intimately linked in the bioeconomy.

Agriculture is product of the ingenuity and labor of archaic women that allowed to go from about 50 million humans on the planet to the 7,500 today, that is, 15,000 percent more. But for this to happen and everyone can feed themselves, productivity required profound changes. According to FAO, 50% of the economically active population (EAP) in the agricultural sector is female with a higher percentage in developing countries, 61% and 79% in less developed countries.

Animals require multiple and complex molecules to feed themselves such as vitamins, amino acids, carbohydrates or fats, whereas plants only require the sun, CO2 from the air and water and minerals from the soil. These come from the fraction of the original rocks or the decomposition of plant organic matter. In European samples of cereals and legumes from up to 7900 years ago it is proven, from the content of N-15, that these grains had been fertilized with manures since they have a higher concentration of this isotope. Manure was the oldest fertilizer used in many civilizations. These men were able to notice that where the animals had been the vegetation was favored. An important example is the military and political Cato the Elder in 200 BC recommended adding lime to acidic soils and growing legumes, although he did not know that in their roots the rhizobiums were capable of capturing nitrogen from the air and transforming it into usable nitrates for both them as for subsequent crops. Another practice was the rotation doing some crops after deforesting and allowing the natural vegetation to prosper for a few years, accumulating organic matter, it was also the technique of the Mayans in Yucatan.

In multiple tests the first chemists, the alchemists were advancing in discoveries as much in the relevance of the nutrients as the nature and composition of these. One of them, Van Helmont in 1609 put a 2.50 kg plant in 100 kg of soil, at five years the bush weighed 84.50 kg and the soil had only lost a few grams, it was the photosynthesis with those grams of nutrients the responsible. Another, John Woodward, in 1699 grew plants in rainwater, Thames waters, water from London sewers, and water from these same moldy sewers and established that the more impure the water, the better the plants grew. Around 1840 Liebig establishes his law by which a plant limits its growth by the assimilable element whose concentration in the medium is the weakest. Shortly after with the discovery of ammonia synthesis the fertilizer industry is born.

In the South American Pacific there were wars over seabird guano or saltpeter, more recently over phosphate rocks in North Africa.

In Argentina, production multiplied but fertilized very little, export duties and the differential currency between products and inputs are cause and consequence. In an INTA work to Fertilize they compared the original pristine soils with a series of variables measured in 2011 and repeated in 2018. Of course, all the variables compared to the pristine ones were worse. Between 2011 and 2018 there are very interesting data such as that the OM, except in some regions, there were no changes, balancing the carbon balance. The N and S are severely affected. The PH decreases and can affect the mineralization of N. P continues to decrease, being increasingly limiting, with critical values ​​for Ca, Mg and K. Zinc becomes the most limiting of the micronutrients.

As a result of the bad policies implemented in our country, we have gone from a million poor people in the 1970s, 5%, to about 18 million today, we manufacture 340,000 poor people each year. Soils is another form of impoverishmentFor all of them, to solve them, we must formulate State policies that generate another reality, at least triple exports from a quality education that trains free citizens.