ammonia volatization

If you garden, do lawn maintenance, or farm, you’ve probably added nitrogen fertilizer to your soil. Nitrogen is the most common nutrient to limit plant growth—because plants need quite a lot of it (10-60 g per kg of plant mass, to be exact). It also doesn’t stick around very long in the soil. Instead, it ends up in places where we don’t want it: in groundwater, water bodies, and even the atmosphere. But, why? And how can we get nitrogen to stay in the soil, where plants need it? To answer that question, we need to take a closer look at the nitrogen cycle. The nitrogen cycle, in which nitrogen moves through soil, water, air, and organisms, is one of the most complex element cycles. Luckily, keeping nitrogen in the soil simply involves reducing the losses of nitrogen from the soil. Losses are ways that nitrogen exits the soil. To keep nitrogen in soil, we need to reduce four key losses: Leaching Ammonia volatilization Denitrification Harvesting What Are Leaching Losses? Leaching happens when water traveling through the soil¹ dissolves nutrients from the soil, and carries them downwards into the groundwater table. Leaching losses are largest in wet climates, especially regions with enough rainfall to support plant growth year-round. In the United States, for example, wetter regions east of the Mississippi River have much higher leaching losses than drier regions in the Southwest. In wetter areas, about 30% of nitrogen fertilizer is lost due to leaching. This leached nitrogen contributes to ...