Accelerating innovations to transform today’s leaky nitrogen system presents an opportunity to significantly cut emissions and pollution while maintaining the high agricultural productivity we need to feed a growing world.
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers have transformed agriculture—boosting food production and nutrition—and remain essential to feeding the world. Yet the current system is highly inefficient: only ~15% of nitrogen used in agriculture ends up in food, with the majority lost as pollution that harms our air, water, climate, and ozone layer. Agricultural fertilizers and manure emit nitrous oxide, a long-lived super pollutant about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the planet, and the leading ozone-depleting substance still released today. Ambitious nitrous oxide mitigation could avoid the equivalent of up to 235 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions by 2100.
Transforming today’s leaky nitrogen system presents an opportunity to significantly cut emissions and pollution while maintaining the high agricultural productivity we need to feed a growing world. By accelerating innovations—such as improved crop genetics, manure recycling, and feeding more nitrogen directly to livestock and less through feed crops—we can achieve significant reductions in nitrogen pollution. Greater efficiency can also reduce costs for farmers.
In 2024, Spark joined a group of leading experts to chart a new path for broader system transformation called Nitrogen 2.0. This new approach aims to enable significantly deeper reductions in nitrogen loss through improved crop breeding, animal feeding, and manure management. Nitrogen 2.0 complements ongoing efforts to reduce nitrogen loss through the ‘4Rs’ approach—using the right fertilizer source, at the right rate, right time, and right place—while identifying additional opportunities for impact. It can also complement efforts to enhance biological nitrogen fixation, develop renewable sources of fertilizer production, and many aspects of regenerative agriculture, such as crop/livestock integration, soil health practices, and crop diversity.
Only
of nitrogen added to croplands ends up in products for human consumption.
carbon dioxide equivalent of global nitrous oxide greenhouse gas emissions every year from soil management.
premature deaths are attributed annually to air pollution from nitrogen oxides, ammonia, and fine particulates.
The goal is a food system that is highly productive with far more efficient, effective, and circular use of nitrogen. Specifically, our work will focus on three pillars:
Developing new crop varieties that extend growing seasons and capture nitrogen before it is lost to the environment, and breeding reduced-protein corn for animal feed and biofuels, which lowers overall fertilizer demand.
Feeding nitrogen directly to livestock through supplements and other approaches to reduce the reliance on supplying animals the nitrogen they need from fertilized crops like corn. Several promising feed options have already been demonstrated to be effective.
Greatly improving recycling of the nitrogen content of manure onto croplands to reduce fertilizer needs and to avoid nitrogen pollution from manure.
A re-imagining of the crop and livestock systems through technological development and management innovation that could significant cut nitrogen losses to air and water while maintaining the productivity needed for human nutrition and food security.
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