the.com/denitrification
Bacteria exhale nitrate like we exhale carbon dioxide, and your fertilizer vanishes into thin air.
means The microbial process that converts nitrate in soil or water back into nitrogen gas (or nitrous oxide), releasing it into the atmosphere.
from Built plainly from Latin-rooted chemistry: the prefix 'de-' (undoing, removal) plus 'nitrification,' itself from 'nitrogen' — a word coined in the 1790s from French 'nitrogène,' meaning roughly 'niter-forming' (from Greek 'nitron,' native soda/saltpeter, plus '-gen,' producer). As chemists in the 1800s mapped the nitrogen cycle, 'denitrification' was coined straightforwardly as the mirror-image term to 'nitrification' — not a word with folklore behind it, just lab-built vocabulary for a process microbiologists were busy discovering in soil bacteria.
- end product
- turns nitrate back into harmless nitrogen gas
- oxygen hatred
- microbes do it only when oxygen is scarce
- farm cost
- wastes billions in nitrogen fertilizer yearly
- climate twist
- side reaction leaks nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas