I was joking to a friend of mine that I can convert food into nitrogen fertilizer just by eating it. He said that was a load of crap. Turns out that we were both right.
Your urine is actually the nitrogen fertilizer, it is full of urea. Which actually pairs very well with hydroponics and heavy nitrogen feeders like leafy greens and herbs. The field of research covering sterilizing urine and using it for hydroponics is called anthroponics.
This is why I love aquaculture and permaculture. Closed loops, and always looking to nature on how she does things. Love the channel Hoocho and love the knowledge you give in your videos. 🤙🤙🤙
At the end of the day every system is a closed loop, I just hope we can balance the global nutrient/carbon/energy system accounts by developing novel new technologies such as this to utilise free energy in the form of sunlight to return those balances to pre industrial levels.
@@HoochoBro, do you think we are going to return to pre industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere ever? Im going to have to assume you dont know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now compared to when we first started measuring it in the 50s. The only way that will happen is with investment into affordable efficient carbon collection technology. And with that technology, carbon footprint wont matter anymore. Developing this type of technology and mass manufacturing it will probably cost less than Joe Biden devoted to electric car chargers in Build Back Better.
I'm optimistic, yet I've learned there are often 2nd or 3rd order consequences that may not be readily apparent for years. That being said, the flip side is that every new iteration usually gets better, safe, and addresses the previous known issues. Fingers crossed this advancement won't be locked behind "bureaucratic red tape".
For sure. Humans have a habit of making solutions to problems that make more, but different, problems in the future. Burning fossil fuels was a solution and enabled a lot of things. Also made some problems for ourselves. What happens when we suck huge amounts of nitrogen out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere seems to be fairly important!
@@sust8n Nature converts amonia back to nitrógen without problem and Nature is craving for amonia very seriously. Amonia is poisonous but some bacteria eat it very qwickly to make nitrates that are used by the algae and plants to grow. If you pollute a large mass of wáter with amonia the algae and bacteria Will grow so much that they start to use all the oxigen in water and sufocate other lifeforms. When they have used all the oxigen and everithing is dead another kind of bacteria start using amonia and nitrates to eat the dead mater producing nitrógen and other swamp gases. I think the 2° order consecuences may be related to exces amonia in the soil and wáter rather that low amonia in the Air. Sorry for the spelling im writting with the spanish autocorrect 😂.
@@sust8n There will be 0 chance to suck too much Nitrogen out of the athmosphere to have an impact. To visualize: The wood mass around the world contains 50% carbon (taken out ot the air) and 0.5% nitrogen. The athmosphere is 0.04% carbondioxide and 78% nitrogen.
The production of Nitric acid is very energy intensive. I work in a factory that employs the Ostwald Process to produce Nitric acid from Ammonia. This plant requires huge amounts of energy. In theory, if this energy could be provided by renewable sources, it would be carbon neutral. But at this time it uses electricity produced mainly by coal and heat produced by burning gas.
I just want to say that you can do this *today* using a solar panel, inverter, basic aquarium air pump, a couple of beakers full of water and crushed limestone/shell/etc, and a transformer normally used to create a spark for oil/gas furnaces. This uses the birkeland eyde reaction (less efficiently, but good enough that it can be done in any small greenhouse) to generate nitric acid bubbled through water to dissolve calcium carbonate and produce calcium nitrate.
Really impressed with this episode. I've got a 20 acre farm in Caboolture SE QLD. Growing spray free gives lower yields without netting. Using 100 chickens for our nitrogen, but the grain we buy to supplement their pasture feeding has a lot of fossil fuel input. This nitrogen electrolyser might be a great tool in the future, to pair with our large solar array.
Breakthroughs to the Haber-Bosch process are cool. I don't think they are as necessary as Pollan or others suggest. They seem to underestimate the power of bacterial nitrifying systems. They don't require inoculated legumes, any bioponic system can create all the onsite fertility needed at any farm.
I grow my veg organically, and it supplies about 2 of the 12 months of my intake. I live in a single level dwelling with about ~8 months of non-growing season. I prep for the next season growing my starts indoors for a few months before transplanting into my garden
I grow my own food too as much as I can. It’s difficult to keep most of my harvest to last . I can my vegetables garden harvest to get me through the fall . But around January I’m needing some fresh produce and head to the store lol
Amazing video, glad you didn’t skip over the growing and eating local. Hard to understand the scale of industrial farming, but society wouldn’t be what it is without it. I still think having more smaller scale permaculture minded growers can help, but it likely won’t work for everyone everywhere. Great news and would love to see where this leads! Exciting times ahead
This very interesting article in Science shows the data and schematics. This new process will still have to use natural gas by SMR (steam methane reforming) for the cheapest production of H2 gas which will then be catalyzed with N2 from the air to form NH3. The electrolysis of water for H2 gas production is possible if cheap solar electricity is available.
Thank you for providing the links to the original scientific papers, that's really a stimulating topic for a chemist like me. And I'm happy to find such information in a youtube channel like yours, you never know where you're going to find cool stuff like that :D
South Africa held a green hydrogen summit I think last week or the week before. We are determined to become a huge ammonia producer from green hydrogen. We are already expanding a SASOL green hydrogen plant that generates 150kg of hydrogen per day to 5.5tn per day from mid next year. So the aim is to tackle issues you’ve raised but yes even this new technology seems amazing especially if the price tag will be afforded by close to all farmers. I think in the future most farmers will get their chemicals from sustainable green sources, things are really changing behind the scenes.
This is cool, reminds me of the plasma arc research I saw a few years ago that claims to have devices that ALMOST match the efficiency of the HB process, although the end product being compared here was nitric acid, rather than ammonia. I love how these old technologies are being looked into again and being altered to become efficient enough to be a replacement.
This was a succinct way to encapsulate the difficult world of new tech into old world tech that has made food. I wish i could get something similar to this to plug into the wall extract nitrogen fun the air, and make fertilizer at home. It would make a cool mad scientist addition to my growing hobby.
Awesome video. Thanks for pulling this all together. It is a good start. Now,To take this colorless gas from the process you described into a liquid to then be combined into the final product may still be beyond the capacity of local farmers. But it does speak to a piece of the challenge.
Glad that there are positive developments that seem realistic. We may not be doomed after all. I can't wait to have an autonomous lettuce hydroponic autofertiliser system. The future looks green
Fish 🐟 and Sand ⏳ are a solution to solve the problem today. Why haven't you tried sandponics? It's hands down the best integrated aquaculture method. It's so simple you just need washed river sand. You'll never have to adjust PH again in your life it'll stay perfectly stable at 6.4. With high stocking you can fertilize your entire garden and your fish tank stay stable because of the sand 😮!
Nitrogen reduction will be all over the place soon, as a way to store and transport "green" H2 for usage in clean industry processes. Amonia can be turned back into H2 by a process similar to steam reformation. Maybe we will get some amonia for our fields, too! Problem is, that the preasure seems to be a lot higher in industry processes than in farmin. At least in Europe..
Recommend that everyone look into Dr Elaine Ingham. Mother nature is much better at freeing nitrogen than we are. The more we try to fix it the more we break it.
thank you for your time and all you do, including not giving into click bait titles. before watching was a little scared we lost you, see you next vid my friend
We have plenty of nitrogen (urea) in our urine. It can be easily added to hydroponic systems. It is free and it is actually so high in nitrogen that youre better off feeding it to leafy greens, cannibus and herbs, wheras flowering plants can take a combination of urine plus some powdered egg shells mixed with fine wood ash. Or urine + a "blooming" nutrient which will be high in potassium and phosphorus.
I'm old enough to remember days when you fed your family from your backyard garden and community co-operatives. People have become lazy and sucked into consumerism and the 'time is money' ethic which has enveloped the western world - the main areas responsible for the ecological crisis we find ourselves in. Yes, I'm aware it's far more complex than that.
thanks for the great info! i had no idea. but now i have to somehow convince my dad that we wouldnt be able to survive on natural fertilizers alone. grumpy egos i swear
If this new process enables us to produce more ammonia per energy input, that's a good thing, but it doesn't address the underlying problem at all: extremely low nitrogen fertilizer efficiency worldwide. Over 80 % of applied nitrogen fertilizer is not taken up by plants, but goes into the ground water or atmosphere, creating massive pollution. It's like using eco-friendly processes to build an atomic bomb; well-meaning for sure, but it kind of misses the point, doesn't it?
This was very interesting, and when you consider Tractor EV's have been available for a few years and we are on the cusp of Electric trucking (Not just battery powerd). The could just start to improve a little.
This is great and all but the end goal needs to be organic. Bacterias and fungus need to be understood in order to enable farmers to produce the necessary chemicals,NPK, on the field. Also it would be much appreciated if this technology was open source as the bosch harber and birkland process are.
Accessible to all counties with the only barriers being: water, sunlight AND licensing fees/access to the technology unfortunately But this is great, it might finally put sustainable and healthy food in the hands of most consumers in developed countries at least
In the US only 1.4% are Farmers. For more organic food, a solution is to get more people back to Agrarian lifestyle, since most people are unhappy in their current state of living anyway. People are wasting their time playing videogames and getting high and have little to no purpose in life. They may as well get back to the old ways.
Yes we need to push a culture that people take their health into their own hands and grow as much of their own food as they Can. The industrial corporation complex will not ever produce enough organic food for us to rely and live on.
I’m not sure that statistic is correct. Perhaps it applies to a population of people that choose farming as a career, but more people are becoming nearly self sufficient on a quarter acre, and homesteading is increasing in popularity amongst women. The 1.4 percent may be selling to retailers, restaurants and schools? A lot of people are staying off books by buying their own seeds.
I actually find being a farmer gives me loads of time for playing video games. I work on my own time and when the work is done I'm not sitting around waiting to clock out.
I see traditional farming (home grown as always, not conventional), hydroponics with these new techs (and this is key), and regenerative farming, as the pilars of a sustainable future food sistem.
I wonder if it would be possible to provide all of the nitrogen for a hydroponic system with azolla. I imagine it would be impractical, but it would be interesting.
Great video! I like your info and channel. I wonder why more Hydroponic growers don't consider trying Aquaponics as a solution to their nitrogen source problem? I know that Aquaponics is more complicated and that fish don't want to live in a pH that is more advantageous to plants (6pH range), but if we were to decouple the fish (aquaculture) from the hydroponic nutrient, we could then adjust the pH of the nitrogen-rich hydroponic solution and therefore help our fish out by providing a water change, while feeding our plants.
I'm not sure where aquaponics nutrients come from (the fish food) I've heard most of the pellets are made from ocean fish bycatch... Travel up the chain of nutrients and usually you hit either fossil fuel or a natural resource that is exhaustible.
@@Hoocho yes, the fish feed contains fish meal which makes the fish pellets more palatable to the fish. I hope that someday we can produce a land-based fish meal substitute that will allow the oceans to recover. 🙏🔬
Great insight and awareness. Learning and understanding how our food economy produces and distributes goods has been a struggle. Would love to see more of this. Thank you Hoocho!
At the end of the day if we didn't waste all our food feeding cows and pigs and chickens and just eat it ourselves our land requirement for agriculture would reduce massively. Rendering this whole issue null and void.
Can you do a check, if bioreactor output, can be used also? Like when you put all your waste into your own anaerobic digester? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestate en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digeponics Or compare your own mixture of hydrophobic fertilizer with a fertilizer from an anaerobic digester for municipal waste?
The key word is locally produced. We don’t need food grown on the other side of the wold. It really bums me out seeing apples from USA, France or even New Zeeland here in Sweden where there are appletrees in a lot of gardens. We also don’t need avocado, asparrigus all year, oranges etc. We really need to re-think the way we eat and shop. In the 80’s Sweden was almost self sufficient regarding meat, milk, grains, potatoes etc, today we wouldn’t last more than s few weeks.
The cost of the unit and the amount of electricity required is massive, due to the enthalpy and entropy to produce the the ammonia. Until the underlying calculations are done and costed it is all hype. Very likely the cost will be more than conventional. Meaning if used so will the food cost more. However: Fossil fuels will be economically depleted later this century, this will be the major source of ammonia, but where will the phosphorus, potasium and other essential minerals come from and what will power the food production machinery.
Couple of things, as a scientist and a doctor myself, cathode and anode reactions have been known to humanity since ancient Egyption times this is purely "research" article of a by product of lithium battery technology publication. I have read the original article, yes the yield is promising however the cathode and anodes are not renewable in a sustainable way just like lithium batteries. Until the day humanity can convert most things using silicon or other cheap abundant atmospheric chemicals/minerals in addition to the abundance of electricity it will not be truely sustainable, the other comes down in cost, the current plantations will requires billions of reinvestments to move on from the current natural gas systems. Also with my chemistry background using pure produced hydrogen is a much more reliable sustainable method although the yield is not high enough the scalability is infinite.
Nice 1 Mr Hoocho. Great insight into a interesting process getting round our hydrocarbon addiction. Funny how once again Lithium is the answer to our problems. Maybe the oil companies will just buy up the lithium reserves as a tilt on their current control of the worlds energy resources.
It pointed to technology discovered developing lithium batteries. I'm not sure it uses Lithium in the electrolyte. "The research developed a unique electrolyte that produces a high-performance layer on the operating electrode to support the reaction that converts nitrogen into ammonia."
I remember posting, quite a while ago, requesting a video on making organic nutrients and your response was pretty much 'why, it only cost me cents to do it.' This was the reason why. Locally produced sustainable hydroponics was a dream to be realised. Seems your tune has changed lol Secondly. Urine denatures into ammonia after about 2 weeks. All we need are pots to piss in.
disagree with summary of mass ag and its benefits, though "organic," isn't better... but one of the main barriers for me with hydro is sustainability, so really good news
Clean and safe molten salt reactors operate at temperatures high enough to produce the process heat required to fix nitrogen and yet are carbon neutral.
been yrs since i last looked and longer since i was connected to the land but keep an eye on ground salt levels in areas considered food bowl areas. in Australia the prospects have been grim for yrs but there have been agendas also. i dont agree or disagree and have no idea as to solutions but to see the desolation of ground due to salt is tragic to see if only for better irrigation practices. so now they turn to desert farming full of well drained sand and a need for chemicals with Artesian water.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:01 🌱 Introduction to Sustainable Food Production - Discussing the problem of reliance on fossil fuels in food production. - Highlighting the dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and nutrient production. 01:08 🔍 The Haber-Bosch Process for Ammonia Production - Explaining the significance of ammonia in food production. - Describing Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process and its impact. - Emphasizing the reliance on fossil fuels in the current process. 04:51 🌾 Challenges of Transitioning to Organic Farming - Discussing the challenges of transitioning to organic farming. - Comparing organic and synthetic fertilizer inputs and their environmental impact. - Highlighting the energy-intensive nature of some organic farming practices. 09:27 🔄 Alternatives to Fossil Fuel-Powered Ammonia Production - Introducing the nitrogen reduction reaction as an alternative. - Explaining the recent breakthrough in increasing ammonia yield through an electrochemical process. - Discussing the potential for decentralized, renewable ammonia production and its applications. 13:39 🌍 Implications of Renewable Ammonia Production - Describing the implications of renewable ammonia production for hydroponic growers. - Highlighting the possibility of sustainable food production worldwide. - Discussing the transformative potential for food production in developing countries. Made with HARPA AI
Hey Hoocho, awesome channel! This is helping me a lot with my hydroponic solutions. I was wondering what you think about nutritions from permaculture solutions such as worm farms or methan digesters? Obviously they are not as easy to control as chemical nutrition and I've heard about higher loads of cleaning efforts. But it would make use of compost/ used veggies. Looking forward to your next videos! Cheers from Germany 🇩🇪
This is super cool! I work for a Renewable Energy company here in Aus, so this was super interesting from a work perspective too. I was at a big energy convention this week down in Melbourne and there’s some pretty cool technology for decentralising residential power coming very very soon. Paired with this kind of invention, we’re getting closer to being able to be self sufficient
Theres a theory that fruit grown near your house is healthier for you because its subject to your presence and the goal of the plant is to make you eat it
Interesting Video, thank you! we need local farmers per percentage of population. Farmers inside towns & cities, with greenhouses for spring/winter/fall. Your option is a Fantastic alternative :) but by growing food in the ground I believe the veg. are more nutrient dense? If farming is done with compost it also increases the soils vitality. Science, Mother nature & a willingness to learn/share makes an Abundance for all❤ Thank you for your research, your Veg's look amazing!
I mean, the comments on renewable energy are a bit... out of date. It's fossil fuel based power plants that just output power directly into the grid at time of need, because you don't want to be burning all your fuel continuously at max (that'd be wasteful) and the idea of storing the energy is an additional investment cost. So cheapest and laziest is to only produce power to match the current demand. Renewables are variable cost (although a lot of it is cheaper and faster to put up than a coal or gas power plant), but you aren't buying fuel and you don't need to throw fuel into them to power them. So the entire modus operandi of renewable energy systems is to capture energy _for use later._ So variable output of the capture mechanism is kinda irrelevant, you would expect it to pass through an energy storage mechanism of some kind (whether that be a battery or pumping water into a dam or what have you). So it doesn't matter that the energy _capture_ is irregular, because the final energy output to the grid shouldn't be. It's a very dumb engineer who decides to use renewable energy systems the same way people use fossil fuel systems.
What percent of the atmosphere is CO2? How does CO2 affect crops? How does algae consume N2? Can it feed fish, and chickens? Last, how is phosphorus recycled.
Excellent video and education... thanks... of course we have to have the nonsense of blah blah Carbon, blah blah renewable for the benefit of the algorithm... but the most interesting word was Decentralized. This will probably mean this gets bought up and shelved....
... very interesting for large scale implementation (I liked your coverage of this a lot actually), but in the mean time... maybe just add fish to your local system ?
Peter Zeihan is wrong. Look up Andrew Millison. There are techniques to raise the water table, reverse desertification and increase organic yields far more than synthetics. Organic farming that creates More water. Even if i put in the name of the video, my comment gets deleted. Very interesting. And weird. So i guess I'll describe the title. It's over how organic WINS over "other methods." Video is from September. 2 months ago
To say you need MORE for organic to produce the same amount as Salts is not true at all. Masanobu Fukuoka tells us in thier book "One straw revolution" that all natural, all organic farming with mulch and cover crops can easily average the same amount of bushels per acre as farmers who were using salts in farming rice for example. It's completely doable, just not with the way modern agriculture works currently.
You sir, have some very controversial opinions that base your arguments. -- There's a lot of information out there about non-industrial farming that I'd encourage you to dig into further. I'm really excited about that device though! -- Insanely useful!
Interested to know which parts you found "controversial"? Yes, there are small farms and non industrial agriculture but the fact is, a large percentage of the industrialized world get their food from industrial agriculture, even when local farmers markets are available. I not having a dig at you, just genuinely interested cheers.
I would say organic farming is mostly just a scam. It gains popularity not because people think it's gonna be more environmental-friendly, but because people think "organic food is more natural, and therefore more healthy, tasty, etc." However, organic farming is actually much more damaging for the soil than using chemical fertilizers. For example, if you grow lettuces, and they take away 15 kg of nitrogen and 20 kg of potassium from the soil, then if you return 15 kg of nitrogen and 20 kg of potassium into the soil, the soil will be replenished. This is a simple task with chemical fertilizers. However, when you do organic farming and use only compost, you cannot control the ratio of nitrogen, potassium (usually 1:1 in compost) and other elements in compost to the correct ratio you need (in this case 3:4 for N:K). So either you use less than enough and have low yield, or enough compost to replenish one element while overshooting another leading to accumulation of certain elements over time, imbalance of minerals and ultimately degradation of the soil. The problem with chemical fertilizers is not of themselves, but because people tend to abuse them and use in excessive amount. What we need are methods to analyze the soil, identify the right amount of each elements needed for supplementation and use just that, in other word precise agriculture. Or you can just use hydroponics.
I know it wasn't your words but you seem to support and agree with organic farming statement. The example used is trying to grow the same as chemical farming as opposed to permaculture methods. Organic permaculture does not have the same draw backs and if no or minimal dig practices then there is no need for external nitrogen. Nature already does that. Yes hydroponics can be a great way for mass production but what about all the power inputs excess chemical disposal, nitrogen blooms in our waterways? Local and seasonal is the answer if local gov supported local producers for everyday staples rather than "trucking blackberries from Mexico" because it's cheaper in your neighborhood then food transport can be just for things you can't grow in regions like tropical fruits for the temperate regions and the "alternatives"to things like milk and gluten because it's trendy use way more resources and chemils all you nut "milkers" look up how much water they need per day! If you don't want to drink due to your beliefs then go without there are other foods that will give you the same nutrition leaving the alternatives for those with allergies
![Digital Circus Episode 4 [TRAILER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/abZtsmMUbJo/mqdefault.jpg)
I was joking to a friend of mine that I can convert food into nitrogen fertilizer just by eating it. He said that was a load of crap. Turns out that we were both right.
😂
Your urine is actually the nitrogen fertilizer, it is full of urea. Which actually pairs very well with hydroponics and heavy nitrogen feeders like leafy greens and herbs. The field of research covering sterilizing urine and using it for hydroponics is called anthroponics.
@@-whackd - I have been pissing away good fertilizer.
This is why I love aquaculture and permaculture. Closed loops, and always looking to nature on how she does things. Love the channel Hoocho and love the knowledge you give in your videos. 🤙🤙🤙
At the end of the day every system is a closed loop, I just hope we can balance the global nutrient/carbon/energy system accounts by developing novel new technologies such as this to utilise free energy in the form of sunlight to return those balances to pre industrial levels.
I have to agree tho, I love me some permaculture and aquaculture, though I’ll have to find somewhere a little more hospitable (or sink a bore) hahaha
@@HoochoBro, do you think we are going to return to pre industrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere ever? Im going to have to assume you dont know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere now compared to when we first started measuring it in the 50s.
The only way that will happen is with investment into affordable efficient carbon collection technology. And with that technology, carbon footprint wont matter anymore. Developing this type of technology and mass manufacturing it will probably cost less than Joe Biden devoted to electric car chargers in Build Back Better.
@@-whackd why not both.
I'm optimistic, yet I've learned there are often 2nd or 3rd order consequences that may not be readily apparent for years. That being said, the flip side is that every new iteration usually gets better, safe, and addresses the previous known issues. Fingers crossed this advancement won't be locked behind "bureaucratic red tape".
For sure. Humans have a habit of making solutions to problems that make more, but different, problems in the future. Burning fossil fuels was a solution and enabled a lot of things. Also made some problems for ourselves. What happens when we suck huge amounts of nitrogen out of the atmosphere. The atmosphere seems to be fairly important!
@@sust8n Nature converts amonia back to nitrógen without problem and Nature is craving for amonia very seriously.
Amonia is poisonous but some bacteria eat it very qwickly to make nitrates that are used by the algae and plants to grow.
If you pollute a large mass of wáter with amonia the algae and bacteria Will grow so much that they start to use all the oxigen in water and sufocate other lifeforms.
When they have used all the oxigen and everithing is dead another kind of bacteria start using amonia and nitrates to eat the dead mater producing nitrógen and other swamp gases.
I think the 2° order consecuences may be related to exces amonia in the soil and wáter rather that low amonia in the Air.
Sorry for the spelling im writting with the spanish autocorrect 😂.
I don't think we can suck a relevant amount of N2 out of the atmosphere.. It's 78% N2. Greenhouse gasses make up less than 1%
@@sust8n There will be 0 chance to suck too much Nitrogen out of the athmosphere to have an impact. To visualize: The wood mass around the world contains 50% carbon (taken out ot the air) and 0.5% nitrogen. The athmosphere is 0.04% carbondioxide and 78% nitrogen.
This channel has come a long way! So awesome to see it growing and succeeding.
The production of Nitric acid is very energy intensive. I work in a factory that employs the Ostwald Process to produce Nitric acid from Ammonia. This plant requires huge amounts of energy. In theory, if this energy could be provided by renewable sources, it would be carbon neutral. But at this time it uses electricity produced mainly by coal and heat produced by burning gas.
I just want to say that you can do this *today* using a solar panel, inverter, basic aquarium air pump, a couple of beakers full of water and crushed limestone/shell/etc, and a transformer normally used to create a spark for oil/gas furnaces. This uses the birkeland eyde reaction (less efficiently, but good enough that it can be done in any small greenhouse) to generate nitric acid bubbled through water to dissolve calcium carbonate and produce calcium nitrate.
Really impressed with this episode.
I've got a 20 acre farm in Caboolture SE QLD. Growing spray free gives lower yields without netting. Using 100 chickens for our nitrogen, but the grain we buy to supplement their pasture feeding has a lot of fossil fuel input. This nitrogen electrolyser might be a great tool in the future, to pair with our large solar array.
Can you grow crops just for the chicken's food? Green manure etc
@@compostaaustralia not currently as in a bad drought
If you have a local source of foodscrap, maybe a pile of composting could provide enough insect protein, help to feed the chickens 😊
Justin Rhodes' video: How Karl Hammer Feeds 600 Chickens (Without Grains)
@@ww07ff soldier fly larvae are amazing scrap food eaters, and loved by our chooks.
Breakthroughs to the Haber-Bosch process are cool. I don't think they are as necessary as Pollan or others suggest. They seem to underestimate the power of bacterial nitrifying systems. They don't require inoculated legumes, any bioponic system can create all the onsite fertility needed at any farm.
I grow my veg organically, and it supplies about 2 of the 12 months of my intake.
I live in a single level dwelling with about ~8 months of non-growing season. I prep for the next season growing my starts indoors for a few months before transplanting into my garden
I grow my own food too as much as I can. It’s difficult to keep most of my harvest to last . I can my vegetables garden harvest to get me through the fall . But around January I’m needing some fresh produce and head to the store lol
Thank you Hoochos for bringing some positivity and light into our disfunctional world.
Would love to see Diy units or kits being sold so small farmers can also produce their own fertilizer independently
Amazing video, glad you didn’t skip over the growing and eating local. Hard to understand the scale of industrial farming, but society wouldn’t be what it is without it. I still think having more smaller scale permaculture minded growers can help, but it likely won’t work for everyone everywhere. Great news and would love to see where this leads! Exciting times ahead
This very interesting article in Science shows the data and schematics. This new process will still have to use natural gas by SMR (steam methane reforming) for the cheapest production of H2 gas which will then be catalyzed with N2 from the air to form NH3. The electrolysis of water for H2 gas production is possible if cheap solar electricity is available.
Link 🔗 please?
Thank you for providing the links to the original scientific papers, that's really a stimulating topic for a chemist like me. And I'm happy to find such information in a youtube channel like yours, you never know where you're going to find cool stuff like that :D
South Africa held a green hydrogen summit I think last week or the week before. We are determined to become a huge ammonia producer from green hydrogen. We are already expanding a SASOL green hydrogen plant that generates 150kg of hydrogen per day to 5.5tn per day from mid next year. So the aim is to tackle issues you’ve raised but yes even this new technology seems amazing especially if the price tag will be afforded by close to all farmers. I think in the future most farmers will get their chemicals from sustainable green sources, things are really changing behind the scenes.
WOW!!!! This is incredible information, thankyou so much for being so passionate about this stuff and raising awareness of it!!
Mindblowing invention! Thanks for bringing this to my and other peoples attention.
What a great video! The content mixed with the editing made a complex subject easy to understand.
can't wait for this to become available to the public. Definately gonna buy one someday.
This is cool, reminds me of the plasma arc research I saw a few years ago that claims to have devices that ALMOST match the efficiency of the HB process, although the end product being compared here was nitric acid, rather than ammonia. I love how these old technologies are being looked into again and being altered to become efficient enough to be a replacement.
This was a succinct way to encapsulate the difficult world of new tech into old world tech that has made food. I wish i could get something similar to this to plug into the wall extract nitrogen fun the air, and make fertilizer at home. It would make a cool mad scientist addition to my growing hobby.
Well done, heaps of information and really well delivered! Thank you
I have no idea how i stumbled upon this channel but im so glad i did! Many videos down now and loving the content. Keep up the great work man!
Awesome video. Thanks for pulling this all together. It is a good start. Now,To take this colorless gas from the process you described into a liquid to then be combined into the final product may still be beyond the capacity of local farmers. But it does speak to a piece of the challenge.
Glad that there are positive developments that seem realistic. We may not be doomed after all. I can't wait to have an autonomous lettuce hydroponic autofertiliser system. The future looks green
Fish 🐟 and Sand ⏳ are a solution to solve the problem today. Why haven't you tried sandponics? It's hands down the best integrated aquaculture method. It's so simple you just need washed river sand. You'll never have to adjust PH again in your life it'll stay perfectly stable at 6.4. With high stocking you can fertilize your entire garden and your fish tank stay stable because of the sand 😮!
Nitrogen reduction will be all over the place soon, as a way to store and transport "green" H2 for usage in clean industry processes. Amonia can be turned back into H2 by a process similar to steam reformation.
Maybe we will get some amonia for our fields, too! Problem is, that the preasure seems to be a lot higher in industry processes than in farmin. At least in Europe..
Recommend that everyone look into Dr Elaine Ingham. Mother nature is much better at freeing nitrogen than we are. The more we try to fix it the more we break it.
Very exciting news! Thank you.
thank you for your time and all you do, including not giving into click bait titles. before watching was a little scared we lost you, see you next vid my friend
Some serious food for thought... Great vid!
Thanks for this very useful information.
We have plenty of nitrogen (urea) in our urine. It can be easily added to hydroponic systems. It is free and it is actually so high in nitrogen that youre better off feeding it to leafy greens, cannibus and herbs, wheras flowering plants can take a combination of urine plus some powdered egg shells mixed with fine wood ash. Or urine + a "blooming" nutrient which will be high in potassium and phosphorus.
Fantastic Technologh and Information
I'm old enough to remember days when you fed your family from your backyard garden and community co-operatives. People have become lazy and sucked into consumerism and the 'time is money' ethic which has enveloped the western world - the main areas responsible for the ecological crisis we find ourselves in. Yes, I'm aware it's far more complex than that.
Awesome video Hoocho! Fascinating and info that needs to be spread! Might be useful when we grow into the solar system too.
That was incredibly interesting..... Obrigado.
thanks for the great info! i had no idea.
but now i have to somehow convince my dad that we wouldnt be able to survive on natural fertilizers alone. grumpy egos i swear
If this new process enables us to produce more ammonia per energy input, that's a good thing, but it doesn't address the underlying problem at all: extremely low nitrogen fertilizer efficiency worldwide. Over 80 % of applied nitrogen fertilizer is not taken up by plants, but goes into the ground water or atmosphere, creating massive pollution. It's like using eco-friendly processes to build an atomic bomb; well-meaning for sure, but it kind of misses the point, doesn't it?
Thank you for this very informative video and for spreading some hope :)
Super break through.... Thanks for sharing....
This was very interesting, and when you consider Tractor EV's have been available for a few years and we are on the cusp of Electric trucking (Not just battery powerd). The could just start to improve a little.
Sounds like some of the best creative destruction I've heard in a long time.
This is great and all but the end goal needs to be organic. Bacterias and fungus need to be understood in order to enable farmers to produce the necessary chemicals,NPK, on the field. Also it would be much appreciated if this technology was open source as the bosch harber and birkland process are.
Love this kind of informative video mate, keep them coming!
Accessible to all counties with the only barriers being: water, sunlight AND licensing fees/access to the technology unfortunately
But this is great, it might finally put sustainable and healthy food in the hands of most consumers in developed countries at least
In the US only 1.4% are Farmers. For more organic food, a solution is to get more people back to Agrarian lifestyle, since most people are unhappy in their current state of living anyway. People are wasting their time playing videogames and getting high and have little to no purpose in life. They may as well get back to the old ways.
Yes we need to push a culture that people take their health into their own hands and grow as much of their own food as they Can. The industrial corporation complex will not ever produce enough organic food for us to rely and live on.
eh, no need to blame video games, what video games got to do with farming anyway? you sound like depressed boomer
I’m not sure that statistic is correct. Perhaps it applies to a population of people that choose farming as a career, but more people are becoming nearly self sufficient on a quarter acre, and homesteading is increasing in popularity amongst women. The 1.4 percent may be selling to retailers, restaurants and schools? A lot of people are staying off books by buying their own seeds.
@@TheBeautifulHairClubthat has me SO excited. If only we could all get organized to share info and trade more reliably.
I actually find being a farmer gives me loads of time for playing video games. I work on my own time and when the work is done I'm not sitting around waiting to clock out.
I see traditional farming (home grown as always, not conventional), hydroponics with these new techs (and this is key), and regenerative farming, as the pilars of a sustainable future food sistem.
Is the 3D Model available through Patreon yet? 😉
Thanks Hoocho, Fingers crossed 🤞
I wonder if it would be possible to provide all of the nitrogen for a hydroponic system with azolla. I imagine it would be impractical, but it would be interesting.
I was thinking the same thing. Has anyone run the numbers and experiments on the viability?
Great video! I like your info and channel. I wonder why more Hydroponic growers don't consider trying Aquaponics as a solution to their nitrogen source problem?
I know that Aquaponics is more complicated and that fish don't want to live in a pH that is more advantageous to plants (6pH range), but if we were to decouple the fish (aquaculture) from the hydroponic nutrient, we could then adjust the pH of the nitrogen-rich hydroponic solution and therefore help our fish out by providing a water change, while feeding our plants.
I'm not sure where aquaponics nutrients come from (the fish food) I've heard most of the pellets are made from ocean fish bycatch... Travel up the chain of nutrients and usually you hit either fossil fuel or a natural resource that is exhaustible.
@@Hoocho yes, the fish feed contains fish meal which makes the fish pellets more palatable to the fish. I hope that someday we can produce a land-based fish meal substitute that will allow the oceans to recover. 🙏🔬
Great insight and awareness. Learning and understanding how our food economy produces and distributes goods has been a struggle. Would love to see more of this. Thank you Hoocho!
At the end of the day if we didn't waste all our food feeding cows and pigs and chickens and just eat it ourselves our land requirement for agriculture would reduce massively. Rendering this whole issue null and void.
Phosphorus is a serious global shortage, Potasium also.
This is great. It wont be long before full scale hydroponics become suitable for almost everyone, even farmers with alot of land. Thats big.
Can you do a check, if bioreactor output, can be used also? Like when you put all your waste into your own anaerobic digester? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digestate
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digeponics
Or compare your own mixture of hydrophobic fertilizer with a fertilizer from an anaerobic digester for municipal waste?
The key word is locally produced. We don’t need food grown on the other side of the wold. It really bums me out seeing apples from USA, France or even New Zeeland here in Sweden where there are appletrees in a lot of gardens. We also don’t need avocado, asparrigus all year, oranges etc. We really need to re-think the way we eat and shop. In the 80’s Sweden was almost self sufficient regarding meat, milk, grains, potatoes etc, today we wouldn’t last more than s few weeks.
Thanks for sharing this amazing info. Could truly be a game changer. Let's try and change the game more wisely than we did with fossil fuels.
The cost of the unit and the amount of electricity required is massive, due to the enthalpy and entropy to produce the the ammonia. Until the underlying calculations are done and costed it is all hype. Very likely the cost will be more than conventional. Meaning if used so will the food cost more.
However: Fossil fuels will be economically depleted later this century, this will be the major source of ammonia, but where will the phosphorus, potasium and other essential minerals come from and what will power the food production machinery.
Incremental improvements.
Duos insequens lepore's neutrum capit
“He that hunts two hares, catches neither”
Couple of things, as a scientist and a doctor myself, cathode and anode reactions have been known to humanity since ancient Egyption times this is purely "research" article of a by product of lithium battery technology publication. I have read the original article, yes the yield is promising however the cathode and anodes are not renewable in a sustainable way just like lithium batteries. Until the day humanity can convert most things using silicon or other cheap abundant atmospheric chemicals/minerals in addition to the abundance of electricity it will not be truely sustainable, the other comes down in cost, the current plantations will requires billions of reinvestments to move on from the current natural gas systems. Also with my chemistry background using pure produced hydrogen is a much more reliable sustainable method although the yield is not high enough the scalability is infinite.
I love Peter Zion!
Nice 1 Mr Hoocho. Great insight into a interesting process getting round our hydrocarbon addiction. Funny how once again Lithium is the answer to our problems. Maybe the oil companies will just buy up the lithium reserves as a tilt on their current control of the worlds energy resources.
It pointed to technology discovered developing lithium batteries. I'm not sure it uses Lithium in the electrolyte.
"The research developed a unique electrolyte that produces a high-performance layer on the operating electrode to support the reaction that converts nitrogen into ammonia."
Hi Andrew the Science article mentions the use of lithium nitride in the process to make lithium & ammonia as the outcome.
When can we buy this on vevor or aliexpress?
I remember posting, quite a while ago, requesting a video on making organic nutrients and your response was pretty much 'why, it only cost me cents to do it.'
This was the reason why. Locally produced sustainable hydroponics was a dream to be realised.
Seems your tune has changed lol
Secondly. Urine denatures into ammonia after about 2 weeks.
All we need are pots to piss in.
disagree with summary of mass ag and its benefits, though "organic," isn't better... but one of the main barriers for me with hydro is sustainability, so really good news
Really love this style of video. Hopefully you can do a few similar ones in the future.
This begs the question, where do wild plants get their nitrogen?
Powerful technology.
Clean and safe molten salt reactors operate at temperatures high enough to produce the process heat required to fix nitrogen and yet are carbon neutral.
been yrs since i last looked and longer since i was connected to the land but keep an eye on ground salt levels in areas considered food bowl areas. in Australia the prospects have been grim for yrs but there have been agendas also. i dont agree or disagree and have no idea as to solutions but to see the desolation of ground due to salt is tragic to see if only for better irrigation practices. so now they turn to desert farming full of well drained sand and a need for chemicals with Artesian water.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
00:01 🌱 Introduction to Sustainable Food Production
- Discussing the problem of reliance on fossil fuels in food production.
- Highlighting the dependence on fossil fuels for transportation and nutrient production.
01:08 🔍 The Haber-Bosch Process for Ammonia Production
- Explaining the significance of ammonia in food production.
- Describing Fritz Haber's invention of the Haber-Bosch process and its impact.
- Emphasizing the reliance on fossil fuels in the current process.
04:51 🌾 Challenges of Transitioning to Organic Farming
- Discussing the challenges of transitioning to organic farming.
- Comparing organic and synthetic fertilizer inputs and their environmental impact.
- Highlighting the energy-intensive nature of some organic farming practices.
09:27 🔄 Alternatives to Fossil Fuel-Powered Ammonia Production
- Introducing the nitrogen reduction reaction as an alternative.
- Explaining the recent breakthrough in increasing ammonia yield through an electrochemical process.
- Discussing the potential for decentralized, renewable ammonia production and its applications.
13:39 🌍 Implications of Renewable Ammonia Production
- Describing the implications of renewable ammonia production for hydroponic growers.
- Highlighting the possibility of sustainable food production worldwide.
- Discussing the transformative potential for food production in developing countries.
Made with HARPA AI
Hey Hoocho, awesome channel! This is helping me a lot with my hydroponic solutions. I was wondering what you think about nutritions from permaculture solutions such as worm farms or methan digesters?
Obviously they are not as easy to control as chemical nutrition and I've heard about higher loads of cleaning efforts. But it would make use of compost/ used veggies.
Looking forward to your next videos!
Cheers from Germany 🇩🇪
That's great. We can now feed several more billion people.
This is super cool!
I work for a Renewable Energy company here in Aus, so this was super interesting from a work perspective too.
I was at a big energy convention this week down in Melbourne and there’s some pretty cool technology for decentralising residential power coming very very soon. Paired with this kind of invention, we’re getting closer to being able to be self sufficient
Very. Very well done.
Theres a theory that fruit grown near your house is healthier for you because its subject to your presence and the goal of the plant is to make you eat it
Interesting Video, thank you! we need local farmers per percentage of population. Farmers inside towns & cities, with greenhouses for spring/winter/fall. Your option is a Fantastic alternative :) but by growing food in the ground I believe the veg. are more nutrient dense? If farming is done with compost it also increases the soils vitality. Science, Mother nature & a willingness to learn/share makes an Abundance for all❤ Thank you for your research, your Veg's look amazing!
not everyone may be able to grow organically in their yard, but every town should be able to
Hanging onto our farm in SE QLD as a sea of houses approaches. Have a portion set aside as community gardens.
You My Friend are an Awesome Human Being! ❤❤👍🏼👍🏼🍀🍀@@andrewradford3953
I mean, the comments on renewable energy are a bit... out of date.
It's fossil fuel based power plants that just output power directly into the grid at time of need, because you don't want to be burning all your fuel continuously at max (that'd be wasteful) and the idea of storing the energy is an additional investment cost. So cheapest and laziest is to only produce power to match the current demand.
Renewables are variable cost (although a lot of it is cheaper and faster to put up than a coal or gas power plant), but you aren't buying fuel and you don't need to throw fuel into them to power them. So the entire modus operandi of renewable energy systems is to capture energy _for use later._ So variable output of the capture mechanism is kinda irrelevant, you would expect it to pass through an energy storage mechanism of some kind (whether that be a battery or pumping water into a dam or what have you). So it doesn't matter that the energy _capture_ is irregular, because the final energy output to the grid shouldn't be.
It's a very dumb engineer who decides to use renewable energy systems the same way people use fossil fuel systems.
He’s right .,
At scale organic never works out.
What percent of the atmosphere is CO2?
How does CO2 affect crops?
How does algae consume N2? Can it feed fish, and chickens?
Last, how is phosphorus recycled.
Good work!
Industrial nutrition helped a few not all ✌️ with better process like you have implemented it might 👏🤙
We need Dr Andrew Twiggy Forrest to get involved with this technology
So good dude 👌
This is epic i cant wait
Future is precision fermentation abd cellar cultivation
Excellent video and education... thanks... of course we have to have the nonsense of blah blah Carbon, blah blah renewable for the benefit of the algorithm... but the most interesting word was Decentralized. This will probably mean this gets bought up and shelved....
... very interesting for large scale implementation (I liked your coverage of this a lot actually), but in the mean time... maybe just add fish to your local system ?
Great stuff as always
Peter Zeihan is wrong. Look up Andrew Millison. There are techniques to raise the water table, reverse desertification and increase organic yields far more than synthetics. Organic farming that creates More water. Even if i put in the name of the video, my comment gets deleted. Very interesting. And weird. So i guess I'll describe the title. It's over how organic WINS over "other methods." Video is from September. 2 months ago
To say you need MORE for organic to produce the same amount as Salts is not true at all. Masanobu Fukuoka tells us in thier book "One straw revolution" that all natural, all organic farming with mulch and cover crops can easily average the same amount of bushels per acre as farmers who were using salts in farming rice for example. It's completely doable, just not with the way modern agriculture works currently.
You sir, have some very controversial opinions that base your arguments. -- There's a lot of information out there about non-industrial farming that I'd encourage you to dig into further.
I'm really excited about that device though! -- Insanely useful!
Interested to know which parts you found "controversial"? Yes, there are small farms and non industrial agriculture but the fact is, a large percentage of the industrialized world get their food from industrial agriculture, even when local farmers markets are available. I not having a dig at you, just genuinely interested cheers.
I would say organic farming is mostly just a scam. It gains popularity not because people think it's gonna be more environmental-friendly, but because people think "organic food is more natural, and therefore more healthy, tasty, etc."
However, organic farming is actually much more damaging for the soil than using chemical fertilizers. For example, if you grow lettuces, and they take away 15 kg of nitrogen and 20 kg of potassium from the soil, then if you return 15 kg of nitrogen and 20 kg of potassium into the soil, the soil will be replenished. This is a simple task with chemical fertilizers. However, when you do organic farming and use only compost, you cannot control the ratio of nitrogen, potassium (usually 1:1 in compost) and other elements in compost to the correct ratio you need (in this case 3:4 for N:K). So either you use less than enough and have low yield, or enough compost to replenish one element while overshooting another leading to accumulation of certain elements over time, imbalance of minerals and ultimately degradation of the soil.
The problem with chemical fertilizers is not of themselves, but because people tend to abuse them and use in excessive amount. What we need are methods to analyze the soil, identify the right amount of each elements needed for supplementation and use just that, in other word precise agriculture. Or you can just use hydroponics.
I know it wasn't your words but you seem to support and agree with organic farming statement. The example used is trying to grow the same as chemical farming as opposed to permaculture methods.
Organic permaculture does not have the same draw backs and if no or minimal dig practices then there is no need for external nitrogen. Nature already does that.
Yes hydroponics can be a great way for mass production but what about all the power inputs excess chemical disposal, nitrogen blooms in our waterways? Local and seasonal is the answer if local gov supported local producers for everyday staples rather than "trucking blackberries from Mexico" because it's cheaper in your neighborhood then food transport can be just for things you can't grow in regions like tropical fruits for the temperate regions and the "alternatives"to things like milk and gluten because it's trendy use way more resources and chemils all you nut "milkers" look up how much water they need per day! If you don't want to drink due to your beliefs then go without there are other foods that will give you the same nutrition leaving the alternatives for those with allergies
awesome news
If this take effect now, oil prices will drop..
2%? Where you getting that from? Livestock alone is more than all transportation combined. 8bn animals! More like 50%
Carbon footprint.... Nearly swore when hearing you say it .
“Fu*k yeah” 🥳
The energy and water fall out of sky for free, its the nutrients we still have to buy