Noah Abrahams

So there's about 50% of the applied nitrogen that reaches our plant.

Feels wasteful to me.

Yeah, it feels wasteful to me as well.

So the issue is not so much the plants, but rather the rate at which they are bombarded with these nutrients.

So it's sort of like if you put a cake in front of someone and ask them to eat the whole cake in a minute.

They actually do also get it from the air.

One way is from lightning, actually.

Lightning creates forms of nitrogen that plants can uptake directly through their leaves.

But the main way that nitrogen is sourced is through the soil.

One of the main ways they get it is from urea, and it needs to be converted into a form that the plant can uptake, which the first one of those is ammonium.

And so to convert urea to ammonium, there's an enzyme in the soil called urease and it functions to very quickly, catalytically convert urea into ammonium.

it has significant effects on the environment.

So the first one is we have ammonium being converted back into ammonia gas.

It creates smog, so a lot of visibility issues over our cities, but that can also then limit our crop's ability to photosynthesise because they can't get the light anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's also very much contaminating our air, which can lead to a number of health issues, including chronic pulmonary issues and also various pulmonary cancers.

Yeah, so it then gets converted via a number of other enzymes that are in our soil into nitrate.

So nitrate is another important nutrient for our plants to uptake.

And so we do need some of this system to occur.

But again, we get more nitrate than the plants can take up.