Livestock feed on animal feed which is produced from some main ingredients which include: corn, soybeans, sorghum, oats and barley. The more cows you want to milk, the more plants you need to grow to turn into feed for the cows.
Plants, like every other living creature, needs nutrients to live, grow and reproduce. This is where the whole debate around food security comes in, and an element we call Phosphorous (P).
P is necessary for living organisms, in the case of plants, phosphorous is used not just energy pathways (respiration) but also growth and most constrainedly, root growth and so uptake of other vital nutrients.
Now agriculture is a business...a very big agri-business. To maximise crop production and yield, you do not want the amount of P in the soil to limit growth, this is the same for the other vital nutrients (Nitrogen and Potassium). NPK fertiliser is added to soils to allow plants to grow. But where does this fertiliser come from... we have known for millennia that poo is just as good a fertiliser as anything else, once more it's natural and we have loads of the stuff!
The mining of P for decades has started to make people wonder... we have had a peak in oil production...will the same happen for phosphorous? Short answer yes. With any finite resource, which P is one, there will always be a peak, and a downward trend following it.
So as I begin to shed light on the nutrient side of things, here is an article calling peak phosphorous into the light, and the implications it might have on foreign policy and food security... who'd 'a thought it... cow poo is related to international relations eh?!?
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