Hello everyone, welcome to our blog and our very first post! As the title goes, an obvious hint about the topic of this post would be about fertilisers!
Agricultural farming has been around for ages. With the advancement in technology, humans have found new efficient and effective ways to grow plantations to produce goods to feed the entire world. And with the growing demand for food quality and stock, it is inevitable that humans would look forth to find ways to improve the growth of our food. And here’s where our handy dandy fertilisers come in!
So, what actually does fertilisers contain? Let’s take a common fertiliser, urea, for example. Urea, like many other fertilisers, is a nitrogenous fertiliser that we apply into our agricultural fields and plantations. Simply put, it is really harmful for humans to ingest high amounts of nitrogen compounds (10 – 45 and above mg/l). Researchers have shown that too much nitrogen levels in our drinking waters could potentially be considered to be carcinogenic and a causative factor for “blue” babies. (Who knew not only should we avoid unhealthy burnt food; we need to avoid high nitrogen concentration drinking water!) “Blue” baby is a terrifying defect that happens to pregnant women who ingest high nitrogen concentration water. The result could potentially be their babies forming malfunctioned hearts resulting in low oxygen circulation, turning them blue.
There are of course standard guidelines for drinking water emplaced by WHO to abide by (I will leave the reference link below). With the high amounts of fertilisers that is required in our farming nowadays, it is truly worrisome to think about the possible agricultural run-offs due to rain or watering of plantations that end up into our groundwaters. This is especially so that we have scarce water resources (only 0.62% of water on Earth is available) and groundwater is one of our water sources that require the least amount of cleaning. However, when these nitrogen compounds are too high that it goes beyond WHO standards, removal is required using advanced technology and it is really very expensive even for developed countries to afford!
If you think about it, we produce our food to poison our limited scarce water resources. What an irony that we are harming ourselves for our own demands for food! But with that being said, is it possible we can find a way to grow our food efficiently and effectively without slowly poisoning ourselves? Perhaps we will leave that to another blog post! For now, take care and stay safe folks! 😊
References:
Agrawal, G., Lunkad, S. and Malkhed, T., 1999. Diffuse agricultural nitrate pollution of groundwaters in India. Water Science and Technology, [online] 39(3), pp.67-75. Available at: <https://iwaponline.com/wst/article-pdf/39/3/67/36089/67.pdf> [Accessed 25 June 2020].
- Rolling Revision Of WHO Guidelines For Drinking-Water Quality. Geneva: World Health Organization.
Picture referenced from:
- [image] Available at: <https://www.swiss-singapore.com/knowledge-hub/changing-dynamics-of-urea-trade-in-the-fertiliser-sector/> [Accessed 25 June 2020].
- [image] Available at: <https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/urea-fertilizer-bags-14322681162.html> [Accessed 25 June 2020].