Noah Abrahams

Exactly.

And so what we end up with is nitrate being leached out of the soil into the water.

So once the nitrate gets into the water, it basically enriches the water with nitrogen and that leads to algal blooms.

And it can also impact corals and can lead to bleaching events.

And it can also affect our atmosphere on that bigger scale from the production of nitrous oxide as well.

Nitrous oxide too.

Which we haven't even gotten to yet.

So this is our third one, which is basically any nitrate that isn't leached and isn't consumed, then undergoes further processes to ultimately form nitrous oxide or N2O.

And that is a greenhouse gas.

The problem is that nitrous oxide can actually hold way more energy than carbon dioxide.

In terms of what we can do, one strategy, which is what I was researching, is creating slow-release fertilizers.

So the idea is we put the same amount of nitrogen in the soil, but we put an additive effectively with the fertilizer to slow down its conversion in that very first step so that it remains as unreacted urea in the soil for a longer period of time.

So there's two sort of approaches with these slow-release fertilizers.

One is to create a coating around the fertilizer that actually helps it remain intact so the fertilizer just remains unreacted in its coating.

So this is using solid granules.

Okay, sort of like the plant food that I'd spread around.

Okay.

So the idea is you get your urea granules, which are very easy to make, very cheap, very easily stored, easily transportable.

That's why they're so popular.

And then you create a coating, typically a polymer coating.