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Phosphorus is essential for life. It’s the second most abundant mineral in the body and critical for bone structure and bodily functions. Like humans, plants need phosphorus, too, and because of this, it is a key component of fertilizer.
Phosphorus also has a dark side. It’s used to make firebombs, rat poison, and nerve gas. The increased reliance on phosphorus has created dangerous conditions for humans and animals through its misuse and overuse.
Award-winning journalist Dan Egan explores both sides of phosphorus in his new book, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance.
In his interview with my cohost, James Connolly, Dan discusses the inspiration for his book, which he found while researching his previous book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. He found that phosphorus from agricultural runoff was causing awful algae blooms on Lake Erie.
From there, his research took him to Hamburg, the battlefields of Waterloo, and the Bone Valley of Florida to tell the story of phosphorus.
Listen in as James and Dan discuss:
- The history of NPK fertilizers
- The Law of the Minimum
- The impacts of the Clean Water Act
- What phosphorus is doing to lakes in the US
- What the future of phosphorus looks like
Rather watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out here: Episode 252: Dan Egan
Resources:
The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Connect with Dan:
Twitter: @danpatrickegan
Episode Credits:
Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers and James Connolly. Our producer is Emily Soape. And, of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Global Food Justice Alliance members, and listeners.
If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join.
This podcast was made possible by LMNT, my favorite electrolyte company. The all-natural sugar-free powder tastes great and gives you the perfect amount of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you perfectly hydrated.
Check out my Salty Grapefruit Limeade made with their limited-time grapefruit flavor. Plus, you can get a free flavor sample pack with any purchase using my link: sustainabledish.com/LMNT
Transcript:
Diana Rodgers, RD
Welcome to the Sustainable Dish Podcast. I’m Diana Rodgers, a real food registered dietitian, author, and sustainability advocate. I co-host this podcast with James Connolly, who was a producer on my film Sacred Cow. I also founded the Global Food Justice Alliance, an initiative advocating for the inclusion of animal-source foods like meat, dairy, and eggs for a more nutritious, sustainable, and equitable worldwide food system. You can check it out and join me at global food justice.org. Thanks again for listening. And now, on to our show.
James Connolly
Good morning. It’s James Connolly for Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I had the opportunity to pick up a book – actually just randomly found it, and just been released. And I’ve actually passed it on to a number of farmers and friends and anybody I can kind of get my hands on to kind of talk about this. And I reached out to Dan Egan, who is on the podcast today, to kind of talk about it. But I want to give the name and the title of the book is called The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance. And I got a chance to actually listen to and partially read his book, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, prior to that. And I think that this is… Dan is really bringing a huge amount of sort of his exploratory power to understanding some of the aspects that is the modern agricultural movement today, the way that we produce food and the levels to which we have sort of terraform the planet in order to feed ourselves. And I think that all of that sort of feels like a Faustian bargain. The 20th-century sort of feels like a Faustian bargain in a way. We’re able to utilize enormous amounts of optimism towards sort of feeding the world. And but sort of recognizing that some of that optimism really never looked at the long-term cost of a lot of that stuff. So I wanted to welcome Dan on and this is an incredible book. It is one of those books that I actually really, really love to read because it will sort of float into the microscopic and macroscopic worlds to kind of give a global perspective, but then individual sort of stories, and everything like that. And I’m kind of want to prompt you with a quote from Isaac Asimov that is in the book, it says, “The phosphorus is the elemental link that completes the circle of life. Literally, nothing else can do its job.” Here’s Asimov’s quote, “We may be able to substitute nuclear power for coal, and plastic for wood, and yeast for meat and friendliness for isolation. But phosphorus, there is neither substitute nor replacement.” And Isaac Asimov wrote this in 1959. So thank you so much for coming on, Dan.
Dan Egan
Yeah, thanks for having me.
James Connolly
Yeah, I kind of want to start like, I think one of the things that I found really interesting about this was, there are, again, I have a problem starting this because I think there’s so many sort of elements to this that are really interesting. Maybe we can go into a little bit of Liebig’s history, kind of talk about the origin of NPK fertilizers from the phosphorus perspective, and then kind of talk about how much of that stuff is has influenced the way that we farm in the 20th century? If that’s a starting point.
Dan Egan
Okay. You want me to start just talking about that?
James Connolly
Yeah, yeah.
Dan Egan
Yeah, you know, I’m really coming at this whole issue, just to say at the outset, from a water perspective, that’s how I got interested in it. That’s what I’ve been doing. For the last 25 years, I’ve been a journalist, focusing on covering the Great Lakes. And I got really interested in phosphorus when I wrote a book about the Great Lakes. And I concentrated on what was happening on Lake Erie at that time. They were having horrible algae blooms, and it was driven by phosphorus, largely driven by agricultural runoff. So that’s my entree into this whole issue. And I didn’t… I don’t have a great expertise in the modern food production system or agriculture in general, although I did grow up across from a couple of farms up in Green Bay, Wisconsin when I was a kid. But yeah, I got really interested from the agricultural perspective. When I started reading accounts of what the lengths that the British were going to, I mean, really all of Europe, all of humanity, but Britain in particular back in the early 1800s, it was still the mini ice age, and famine was ever present or always a threat. And you know, it’s an island nation with limited crops and, you know, limited places for people to go. So the British were pretty desperate to keep their crops, their soils productive, and so they would tinker with anything that they could find to give, you know, their turnips and wheat a boost. And you know, since we started agriculture 10,000 years ago, humans, I think, have intuited that soil needs to be replenished. It can’t just forever… well, they didn’t intuit it, they just learned it. But I think they realized that something had to go back into the soil to keep it productive. And so they were working with things like human waste, obviously, animal waste, blood, hair, bone shavings, and that was really interesting. The idea that bones because we have so much phosphorus in our bodies, bones are a very rich source of phosphorus. I don’t think at the time they knew it was phosphorus. They just knew that the bones made things grow. But there’s only… they were using at the outset like shavings from knife factories where the handles were made of bones. But there weren’t a lot of those around. So they went on the hunt for bones elsewhere. And that took them and took me ultimately, to Waterloo, where you know, the British plundered that battlefield five or six years after some 40,000 people fell in about 10 hours, a bunch of horses, and they came back five or six years after the war and stripped all the bones from the battlefield and built special mills to crush those bones and turn them into dust, pulverize them and spread them across the countryside. One of the things I struggled with was when… at what point did they realize ah, it’s not just bones. It’s the phosphorus in bones like chemically. And you were talking about Justus von Liebig? And he was a pioneer in this, but where that actual jump was made? Very difficult. And you know, I think there may have been a number of places where it happened. The line that I the narrative, the arc that I followed, was really when paleontologists in the 19 or in the 18th thoughts, early 18th or 19th century, they were finding specimens along the English Channel so intact that I think it’s Ixiathor, kind of like a giant alligator slash dolphin, whose air breathing. They found some specimens so intact, that they actually had fossilized poop where their fossilized digestive tract was, in Liebig was on an excursion. And forgive me, I’m not going to have the dates right, precisely, but I think it was in the 1820s with a paleontologist at the time, Buckley, that is William F. Buckley. Anyway, he was with a couple of scientists, and they were looking at these fossilized remains of dinosaurs. And they, at that point, they were commonly finding these little fossilized pieces of dung, which they call Bezos stones. They realized that it was they theorized that it was fossilized poop and leaving thought, well, if manure is such a productive source of fertilizer, why wouldn’t fossilize manure be so he did an analysis, and he found that yeah, it had the same contents, specifically, phosphorus that the newer did. And that really helped, I think, make the jump from bones to stones, which is, which are really what sustain our modern agriculture system today, you know, these deposits of sedimentary rock. That was not something that they intuited back then. They didn’t think that they could eat rocks, essentially, or use rocks to put food on their table. But they got there, and they were firmly there by the middle of the 18th century. And that time, you know, a lot of the phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium, the NPK was coming from these mountains of bird poop off of South America, off of Peru specifically. But those, you know, this is the story of phosphorus. They were seen as inexhaustible, starting in the 1840s, and by like the 1890s, they were played out, and that forced us to go rock hunting and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. And those rocks, they’re mostly sedimentary rocks, which are really, you know, just the sum total of a bunch of life that was long gone. And, you know, they just fell on the ocean floor and accreted there and turned into rock, and that rock was made accessible on the landscape, either through ocean level sinking or through tectonic activity – however it happened. There are relatively few of these rock deposits that are above the waterline that are accessible and that sustain them – modern agriculture system that today sustains 8 billion on our way to 9 billion people.
James Connolly
Now, you have a passage in here that I wanted to read that I thought was really interesting. It says, “In 1822, an author who identified himself as a living soldier wrote a piece that appeared in London this morning post, asserting that more than a million bushels of human bones, many of them fallen soldiers were being imported to England annually. So many remains arrived from the cotton so regularly that the special bone grinding mill had recently opened up in eastern England to handle the imports. It is now ascertained beyond a doubt by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that it did soldier is more… is a most valuable article of commerce. And for art that I know to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are in great measure indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.” Yeah. The story you know, and the English actually had earned… I think there’s a, term that’s used is called perfidious albion that was used as sort of a derogatory thing because I think that is many sort of interior scene wars that happened between England and France and all of that stuff. At the end of the day, the collection of bones where you take your dead French soldiers and the English would take their dead English soldiers, and the English ended up taking all of the soldiers. So they earn this nickname to bring all of this stuff back. And I think it’s really interesting because I think that we’re just utilizing geological time at this point, right to these bones, these sedimentary rocks, to sort of mill all of this stuff. Yeah, I think, you know, Liebig was sort of interesting. I think he was… his original fertilizer recipe didn’t really contain nitrogen. At first, it seemed to be an oversight on his part. I don’t necessarily know why. So his original recipe ended up being an utter failure. But I think once he ended up getting the sort of percentages, right, we saw an explosion that…
Dan Egan
I think he also was lacking acid, wasn’t he? I mean, that’s one of the things that I can’t remember. The guy who got the patent from Robbins did research. Anyway, that, you know, he was using sulfuric acid. And that was making because the end of the bones, the early bone experiments, or usages were hit and miss, like in some areas of England that worked miraculously, in some areas, it did nothing. And it turned out that was driven by the acidity of the soil, which Laws – I think he’s the… John Laws is the guy who patented this. There was a guy in Ireland who did the same thing at the same time. And I think Laws ended up buying him out or something. But yeah, that was 1841. You know, that really is the dawn of the chemical fertilizer age.
James Connolly
Yeah and I do kind of want you to go a little bit into some of the aspects of the mining of this Peruvian guano. Because I think that is… it’s sort of the degree of frenzy that kind of happened around that when we started to see the level switch. We, I mean, really thought this, we had 100, at least a couple 100 years of concomerant and guano. And you know, all of this fecundity and fertility, we thought we were… we had hundreds of years of it. And within a decade, it was mostly gone a lot of the 19th-century sort of movement into sort of novel forms of slavery to get people to mine that, but then also the sheer frenzy associated with finding more farmland and population… the population explosions that were kind of happening at the end of the 19th century, kind of created a lot of the movement that ended up becoming part of the neocolonial sort of scramble for Africa, the scramble for the uncommon desert and all of that stuff. Because I think that a lot of that leads into this sort of our understanding of how the early 20th century ended up becoming such a frenzy for these NPK fertilizers. And I don’t necessarily need you to go through the whole history because it’s, it’s pretty trying, but I think it’s an interesting story.
Dan Egan
Yeah, I think it was Humboldt on his grand excursion in the early 1800s. He was exploring South America, and his trip took him off the west coast to South America along the Humboldt Current, which was what it’s known as now. And that was a really… a nutrient-rich upwelling of water from way down south that fish obviously followed and where there were fish, there were birds and those birds needed to nest into poop. And so they did it on this cluster of islands off, they didn’t a lot of places but was very concentrated in this cluster of islands off of, I believe, it was Pisco, Peru and so on. Humboldt was on his excursion, they could smell them from the accounts that I remember reading. They could smell the islands. And you know, there was, it was, turns out this bird poop, in some cases has almost the same NPK ratio as a bag of modern fertilizer. So it was just the perfect crop nutrients. And he was told as much by the locals. And so he brought a batch back much to the consternation of his crew, because I guess it really stunk and brought it back to Europe and added, analyzed and realized that, you know, it had these essential nutrients in it. And that’s it off basically a guano rush and think the Peruvians were reluctant to sell their body because that stuff had been tended to, you know, since antiquity, there’s accounts that, you know, disturbing the islands in certain ways was punishable by death, because they sell those islands is life, which they were. What’s interesting about and so they harvested in a sustainable way. And what’s you know, so you wonder why, while this bird poop on these islands, and it’s largely driven by climate, it just doesn’t rain there. So what would normally Washington to the sea and reenter the circle of life kind of got pulled out of circulation? And you know, I remember one time I was thinking this in my head, I don’t think it made its way into the book. But these islands were just like giant phosphorus batteries. They just… who it was found in a concentration that you weren’t finding anywhere else. But it wasn’t inexhaustible, even though you guess when you’re dealing with poop, you think you have more than you do? They certainly did. And yeah, there were accounts saying, “Yeah, we got, we can go 200 years ahead. And we’ll still be utilizing these islands.” And that was in the 1840s or 50s. And yeah, by the 1890s, it was pretty much gone. You know, and it spread across Europe and North America. And that sent us on for new sources.
James Connolly
Yeah. And we start to get into haber bosch pulling nitrogen from the air, we start to move into some of the aspects of even just the mind, phosphorus that you tell, I wonder if you can tell just a little bit, I just think this story is just so it just leapfrogs across the entire spectrum, the sort of Humboldt story, you know, some of the aspects of the trying to sort of make gold out of basement materials, the original sort of pulling of phosphorus from urine, but then also kind of move it forward into the utilization of phosphorus as a weapon. Because I think that to me, was something I actually found really interesting because I read a lot about the firebombing of Tokyo, and I had read a lot about the firebombing of Dresden, but I don’t think I had ever really thought about the materials that were used. And elements of phosphorus and white phosphorus, it seemed to be one of the things that I was finding kind of amazing. When I think about this stuff. It’s how we take stuff that is so integral to life into something.
Dan Egan
Yeah, well, that, you know, I was mentioning earlier that I was doing research on Lake Erie when I got interested in phosphorus. And I specifically got interested when I was reading the account of the first guy to discover elemental phosphorus. And so the nomenclature for though just to back up a second, the nomenclature in the book, it was a little tricky, because, you know, there’s phosphates, which is really how, you know, we mostly encounter this stuff, which is phosphorus atoms surrounded by oxygen atoms. And then there’s just phosphorus. And that doesn’t exist in the natural world any more than a Styrofoam cup. It’s got to… you’ve got to cleave these oxygen atoms away, and it’s not done easily. And so I was reading about this guy in the 1600s, in Hamburg, Germany. He was an alchemist chasing after the philosopher’s stone, which was like this mythical substance that people believed could transmute base metals like lead into gold. And the thought at the time was that metals were just, we’re just evolving toward a state of gold and silver. And you know, they were always on the move, becoming something more valuable, but it was happening, geologically slow. And even if they didn’t put it in those terms, but the idea was, if we could find the substance that’s making this transformation occur, we could speed it along, and we could get rich. And so this guy, a lot of people thought it could be divined from all manner of substances, and this guy was a urine man. His name was Hennig Brand, and he thought he could find the magical mythical philosopher’s stone in the human waste stream. And so he did a lot of hocus pocus with a lot of urine, and ultimately, sometime in 1669, I believe he was able to distill or precipitate out I don’t even know what the actual chemical transformation would be characterized as, but he got from urine elemental, these little nuggets of elemental phosphorus, which didn’t really do much except for glow in the dark, until they got warm until they got to about 80 Fahrenheit, and then they would just explode. And so this step was really nothing more than a curiosity. For let’s see, 1669 to 7… for more than 100 years, you know, it was just thought that phosphorus was just this novel stuff. Well, they tried to use it in medicine, and they, you know, it was pitched as everything that could cure everything from diabetes, to impotence to you name it, they gave it to people. And it’s poisonous, but they were giving it to them at very, very low doses, but it wasn’t curing anybody. But it did have that knack for combusting. And that, ultimately, put us on the path to weaponizing it. And yeah, for purposes of the book, Hamburg, I really hung up a lot on Hamburg because it was discovered there, phosphorus in 1669. And then in 1943, once the British or once the Americans really got their planes across and built across the ocean, it was time for the allies to, you know, fight back, I guess. And the Nazis had been bombing the heck out of England, you know, for a long time.
Dan Egan
And the British were mad. They were literally mad. Americans were queasy about bombing cities, they were, you know, okay with bombing the industries and the thoughts at the time. I mean, it makes sense. It’s like, look, if we can save a lot of lives. If we can take out a nation’s ability to wage war, we can take out the factory, ball bearing factories, or submarine factories, if we can go to the root of the stuff that is doing all the killing, we can kill that and save people in the long run. But there was an element of revenge in there too. And especially because the English have suffered so mightily under these Nazi attacks. So they decided to burn a city to the ground. And they did a lot of research. With architects, they actually had architects from Germany, working with the British helping them because they started realizing that you can’t blow a city to smithereens with traditional bombs. It’s much more effective to try to burn them down. So they developed these incendiary bombs. And the idea was you just start a ton of little fires until they merge into one super giant fire tornado, which is exactly what happened. And then that can raise a town. And so for over six or seven nights in July, and maybe early August, well, in the summer of 1943, think they were all night raids. No, no, I think the Americans bombed during the day, and the British bombed at night. I’m going from memory here. Because the British were indiscriminate about where they’re going to dry. They didn’t care if they’re dropping it on neighborhoods because they’ve been dropped on. There’s a great quote in the book from Arthur Bomber Harris, the head of the RAF, I believe, just saying that, you know, basically, the Germans started this and they naively thought they could bomb everybody and no one would bomb them back. Well, they’re about to get theirs. And even Franklin Roosevelt, I saw it addressed to Congress that he did and you know, he had this kind of wicked grins like yeah, they’re about the… Germany’s about to get what there due and so the Americans would bomb during the day. There was a submarine plant not too far from there – from Hamburg, on the island of Oosterdam. And no, no, no, there was a submarine factory installments and factories, I believe, right in Hamburg. And but just north up on the Baltic coast, there was the island it was Saddam, which they were building v1 and v2 rockets, which could have really changed the trajectory of the war had that been more successful. So anyway, the Allies just bombed and bombed and bombed and bombed Hamburg, similar to what they did to Dresden, but before that, and I think it was at the time, it had to have been like the largest aerial attack ever. And they accomplished what they set out to do. They burned what could burn in that city to the ground, and they killed 10s of 1000s of people. And a lot of those bombs – they were… they relied heavily. They dropped big… I think they call them… they’re 500 pound bunker busters. No, that’s what we call them today. They’re called… they drop big bombs, but only to blow out roofs and windows too, so fires could convict through a structure. So it was never intended to just blow the city up. It was to burn it down. And so they did that. And it was largely with these incendiary bombs. Some of them were magnesium and some of them were phosphorus, which, you know, was quite a coincidence considering that’s where phosphorus was first discovered. And so that got me intrigued about going to Hamburg. But even more intriguing is this fact that these bombs, these phosphorous bombs, will they explode? They’ll burn through anything that they hit, whether that’s a building or a person that I mean, these globules they look like fireworks. They look exactly like fireworks when they explode, there’s just this glowing glob, and then this trail of smoke behind it. And that glowing glob was, you know, was the devil’s element was white phosphorus. And it would burn whenever it hit unless it hit water. And then it would stabilize. And today, there are, you know, the riverbank, the Elbe that cuts through the middle of Hamburg and like the Baltic coast up by user down, there are signs saying, you know, be careful. So a lot of people up there looking for phosphorus looking for amber because that whole area used to be a conifer forest, you know, millions and millions of years ago. And that generated a lot of resin which created these caches of, it’s called Baltic amber. It’s like a product to kind of like, you know, wild Alaskan salmon. And so amateurs are out there hunting for it. And these column frozen little pebbles of phosphorus look a lot like amber, in some cases, almost exactly like it. So people will pick these little nuggets up from the riverbank or from the Baltic Sea coast, and put them in their pocket and think that they found something, you know, a value, great treasure, and then if they happen to, you know, heat that stuff up in their pocket, which is not uncommon to 80 degrees or more than a combusts. And so I encountered the book, I think I only have one person, but it doesn’t happen every day. But it happens often enough that there are signs along the beaches saying, you know, look out for phosphorus. Yeah. And so today, people are still being burned by this stuff. And as long as we’re talking about Hamburg, it comes full circle, which is really what this books about is the circle of life in my mind. But another circle within that circle is the story of phosphorus in Hamburg, so it was discovered there. And then a city was burned to the ground. I mean, almost, there’s a lot of stone, it didn’t burn. I mean, they really didn’t bomb the heck out of it. And then today, Germany’s got a super strict phosphorus emission law coming on the books at the end of the decade and 2029 I believe, we’re basically all the phosphorus in the human waste stream because there’s a lot of phosphorus in our urine and feces needs to be pulled out before it’s before that treated water is discharged back into area waters around haver. And so they built the state of the art phosphorus recovery plan. So I definitely knew I needed to go to Hamburg to write the story. And so luckily, I made this trip in December of 2019. Otherwise, the book wouldn’t be done right now. Because once COVID travel restrictions came along, it really kind of froze me up. But yeah, so there’s but the you know, there’s the story of elemental phosphorus and the story of phosphates as fertilizer, and they’re intertwined. I mean, to find out where they where they actually, you know, come together is difficult, but people eventually realized that phosphorus along with nitrogen and potassium was essential to soils to keep them productive. And the real hunt for phosphorus I think the real pressure, I don’t think it would have been so great. Had we not had Fritz Haber and Bosch not developed that process for pulling nitrogen out of air because air is what 80% 73% nitrogen and they figured out in I think it was 1909. A process where they could basically the German the literal phrases bred from air. Because they were always hungry for nitrogen at the same time. They were hungry for phosphorus. We talked about Liebig earlier, he’s the guy who pioneered or if not pioneered, popularized the whole concept of the law of the minimum. And so back in the 1800s. You know, it could be nitrogen, a field could be nitrogen-limited or phosphorus limited. I don’t think potassium was ever really that rare. But the other two were and once we unkept, the source of nitrogen, and phosphorus had to keep up. And so that’s what we’ve been doing ever since is trying to match our phosphorus production with our nitrogen productive production. And it’s a game you can’t win in the end, because there’s only so many finite deposits of this phosphorus on the globe. And nitrogen is always going to be in abundance as long as we have the energy to do the whole process of pulling it out of the air.
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James Connolly
Yeah, you have a metaphor that’s talked about when they talked about the law, the minimums. I thought was really interesting. It’s the sort of barrel story. Because I do think that if you’re talking about human health, the way that amino acids work in the body is actually fairly similar as well. The law of the minimum is required in order for you to be able to synthesize the proteins you need to survive. But the way that we grow food is also based on that. So I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about some of the aspects of that because I found that really interesting.
Dan Egan
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s really a common analogy that professors use. I found it all over the internet. But when you’re trying to explain the law of the minimum, you know, a good way to do it is to look at a wooden barrel. And, you know, each plank in that barrel, I think it’s called a stave. And then they’re held together by, you know, steel straps at the bottoms and in the middle. And they say, now imagine, you know, a barrel where one of these staves, one of these planks isn’t high enough to go to the top, well, that’s going to govern how much water you can put in that barrel, you know, it can only go as high as the, you know, it’s kind of like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the barrel is only going to fill to its shortest stave. And so that’s true with agriculture, as you were just pointing out, and so yeah, so many crops were phosphorus limited, it’s like if you can just get more phosphorus, everything else is in place, particularly after haber bosch, and we have all the nitrogen we can handle. It’s all governed by phosphorus for good and ill I mean, that works on a crop, but it also works in our waters in terms of algae that we don’t want.
James Connolly
And that’s a great transition. So I wonder if we can kind of talk a little bit about that, like, let’s start to move into the modern agricultural movement, specifically, like, let’s talk about Florida Bone Valley, where the percentage of phosphorus is coming from there, that we use on our fertilizers, and then maybe talk about Morocco, Western Africa, and some of the aspects of that, because I do think that the finality of having these abundance sites is actually in some ways, kind of scary to me. And you kind of go back and forth between the percentages of what we have left and resources versus, you know, any number of different things. But I think it’s really interesting to transition to what we have now. And then the leaching that kind of happens because of the way that we sort of outlay this stuff to argue agricultural fields. I don’t know where you want to start with that. But I think it’s…
Dan Egan
Well, yeah, so we were talking earlier about the jump from bones to bird poop, to stones and in Florida. So the first phosphorus deposits in phosphorus, I’m just gonna keep calling it phosphorus even though it is phosphates, just to keep it clean. The first phosphorus deposits of significance, I believe, not long after that they found them in Florida. You know, it’s such a low-lying spit of land that it’s got a long history of being underwater and above water. And because of that, there’s a cache of fossils in the center of the state east of Tampa. It’s called Bone Valley, where you get like these terrestrial creatures lying with, you know, like mastodons in the same bed of gravel with giant ancient sharks. They’re like, What the heck was the hook? How can these be together? But that’s a function of the ocean level, waxing and waning. But among those fossilized remains, there’s also a lot of pebbles that are phosphorus-rich sedimentary rock. And so they don’t know exactly why certain areas get this concentration of nutrient-rich rocks, but it just there’s theories, but it’s a geological process, and it’s basically so to rewind here. First sources of phosphorus was coming from igneous rocks, that was just you know, what Earth had when baby Earth cooled and all the molten rock turned hard. There was traces of phosphorus in those rocks, and they leached out into the environment where eventually, when life tickled whenever for whatever reason, there was phosphorus floating around which, you know, Isaac Asimov also refers to phosphorus as life’s bottleneck. I can’t remember if he referred in quote that he used. But yeah, it was a slow trickle. And that meant a slow trickle of life. And the thing about phosphorus is it doesn’t go away. It’s like a water drop. It can be in the sky, it can be at the bottom of Lake Superior. It can be in a glacier, it can be in, you know, some tailings pond of a mine. It can go all over the place, but it doesn’t go away. And the same is true with phosphorus. And early in life in Earth’s history. There was so little of it because it just was it would leach out of these rocks. But once it did, you know, an organism would take it up, use it, die, decay, and another organism would take it and use it up. Now, this wasn’t always the case, in the deep ocean, you know, with stuff falling to the bottom, where it largely drops out of the circle of life. And that’s where we get these rocks. And that’s the original source of, of the sedimentary rocks. So there’s that going on. But there’s also just the stuff that’s just naturally trickling in and out of the living world, you know, it’s something a simple way to look at it as like a forest. You know, what, how can a force keeps sprouting trees? Well, the trees die and decay and release their nutrients. And the phosphorus is where we’re talking about back into the soil to allow for the next generation, and on and on and on, it goes, well, once we figured out, you know, where to find phosphorus-rich rock, this leaching was no longer the mechanism for it to make its way into the environment, we were soaking in acid and putting it in chemical concoctions and spreading it on our field. So we took the circle of life and broke it. And the you know, this isn’t dumb, what we did, it’s what any organism would do, you know, if you can find something that’s going to make you more productive, you’re going to use it. And so that’s how we ended up with this system, where we’re not just using it once, and then using it again, and again, and again, we’re just… we’re basically just putting it out our crops, whenever the crops take up great. The rest of it’s just going to flush into the water, and what does get taken up by a crop and ultimately finds its way into us often, you know, sewage treatment, notwithstanding makes, it just gets dumped back into the water. And so this is kind of an esoteric concept. But you know, people think, well, we’re never going to run out What’s the worry? Well, thing is, is what we’re relying on today, the I referred to earlier as like a battery of phosphors. These are deposits that accumulated over millions of years, and concentrated, and then we’re setting it loose back into the environment in a different in a diffuse way. So it’s not like we can just go back to that pile of rocks, because that’s where the phosphorus ends up. No, it ends up, you know, in Lake Erie, which is turning green as a golf course, every summer now, because there’s so much phosphorus in the water. And so that’s one thing, but also, you talked about how it leeches, how it leeches into the water. We’ve been using so much chemical fertilizer since the early 1900s, that it’s not just turning the water in Lake Erie and waters across the country green, it’s also accreting in the soils in a way that it’s not really that biologically accessible to plants. It’s either too deep or it’s locked up with other stuff. And it’s not, you know, soluble enough to really make its way into a crop. But it does do what with those igneous rocks, did it slowly leeches into the environment. So that’s something that’s going to be going on for a long time. And it’s a consequence of our just aggressive use of fertilizer for the last century in order. I don’t know if that answers your question.
James Connolly
Yeah, absolutely. I want to kind of go into some of the EPA Clean Water Act, the ramifications of that, because I think that what we saw in the 50s and 60s, where we started to use a lot of phosphates in detergents and washing machines and any number of different hadn’t other industrial uses for it. But we started to put curbs on that. But the agricultural, or our agricultural system wasn’t really given in any way curbs on those. So even today, when you try to limit the amount of fertilizers to put on the field, you still have those phosphates that are leaching into that system that will be going on for years to come. One of the things that you kind of talk about I want you to talk about that, but the one of the things you talked about is that the remarkable accuracy that a lot of scientists will have in predicting these algal blooms. They’re really gotten and predict that it’s going to be and then a little bit about what is that doing to the economies that surround that. So Bone Valley in Florida, how has that leaching into the system? How is that affecting the environment that surrounds it, you know, miles and miles downstream? But how is that affecting reverberated through the Great Lakes and a lot of the water systems that have these costs and effects that are I think the US government tends to have to pay for downstream or the US taxpayer has to pay for downstream? I know that’s like three things. But…
Dan Egan
Yeah. I’ll try to keep it straight here. And correctly. So, yeah, we, you know, our first realization that phosphorus wasn’t just, you know, entirely positive substance, in terms of agriculture, and other human uses for it beyond weapons was in the 1950s and 60s is when we started using washing machines regularly like, you know, across the country, and that demanded a better So, which was this chemical concoction called the detergent, which was rich with phosphorus. And it was great for getting clothes clean, but not long after we started, you know, uniformly using the product across the country, water started turning green. And there were some very interesting experiments that I won’t go into. At the moment, it was determined that this was nobody knew what was causing it, but it was determined to be phosphorus. So they pulled phosphorus for most detergents and water quality gotten a lot better. And this was like in the early 1970s. Along the same time, we got the Clean Water Act, which not only addressed phosphorus in terms of discharges from industries and wastewater treatment plants, but all sorts of pollutants coming out of our industrial world. And, you know, that led to strict pollution controls on smokestacks and pipes. But the Clean Water Act largely left alone agriculture. So in regulatory parlance, it’s there’s point source pollution, which is a pipe or a smokestack, just a physical place that is discharging a measurable amount of waste. And then there’s nonpoint source pollution, which is just the stuff on the earth that washes off, and makes its way into our water. And that’s what agriculture is, I mean, maybe more accurately was in the early 1970s. At the time, it was considered, you know, not a significant enough source of phosphorus. And it was too diffuse and too difficult to regulate, that the Clean Water Act basically gave agriculture, a pass on the water regulations that every other industry had to follow. And it made sense at the time. And one thing I want to be clear is I don’t want to disperse, disparage or vilify the agriculture industry, they’re just operating under the system that’s been set up. I may have influenced that at times. But it really is something that, you know, Congress has agreed to it’s it’s the game they’re playing by the rules of the game isn’t working so well, anymore. So yeah, but…
James Connolly
You talk about a, you know, sorry to interrupt, but you talked about at the time, a large, say dairy farm, or a large pig farm at the time would probably be about 100 cows, talking, right? And then…
Dan Egan
So they’ve gotten so much bigger in the last 50 years, which, you know, they are, arguably by definition, now, point source pollution. So I’m talking about the concentrated animal feeding operations that can have 1000 head of cattle. Well, those cattle don’t just make milk, they make manure and urine, and they have to put it somewhere and it first goes to these sewage or manure lagoons, which are a point source of pollution. If they aren’t, I don’t know what is, but they’re not regulated. Well, they are regulated to a degree, you know, these big agriculture operations. Anything that’s happening like on the actual like, where the animals are that you’ve got to get permits to discharge stuff from those areas, water permits. But once that manure gets taken away from its lagoon, which it has to be because the lagoon is going to fill up starts sloshing over, it gets applied on fields, and once it goes on to a field that bureaucratically transforms back into nonpoint pollution and is therefore largely unregulated, and that’s having some real severe consequences for us today. Because I mentioned earlier phosphorus doesn’t just make corn stalks, soybeans grow it can make stuff that we don’t want grow. And that’s where we’re coming. That’s why we’re we’re having all these problems with everything from Lake Erie to bone that are central Florida. Well, the coast of Florida. Lake Okeechobee is like overdosed with phosphorus because there’s so much Ag in the central part of Florida. It’s not tied directly to bone Valley. Only in that, you know, a lot of these operations use fertilizer that is largely concocted from the stuff coming out of out of bone valley, but it gets the phosphorus washes off. And in the case of Florida, Central Florida, it ends up in this big, shallow, warm petri dish of a lake called Lake Okeechobee, where toxic algae blooms magnificently in late summer and because the Army Corps of Engineers which operates this lake, which is actually a fortified system of dikes. The Army Corps of Engineers is always afraid that these docks are going to collapse because they have in the past and to disastrous effect. There were 1000s of people who died in Florida, and I think it was 1926 and 1928. Two separate times that Lake Okeechobee spilled over its embankment and flooded out town. So now there’s about 40,000 people floodways theoretical floodway path. So the Army Corps doesn’t want the water to go get too high on these manmade dikes. So they released the water, and it’s not just water. It’s toxic algae as well, and it ends up going into the Gulf Coast’s around Fort Meyers into the Atlantic coast around the city of Stuart, Florida. So these algae outbreaks are typically… it’s different from the red tide. It’s called blue green algae or cyanobacteria. It’s not technically an algae. It’s photosynthesizing bacteria that produces these nasty toxins. The salt waters around these cities were basically thought to be immune from these kinds of outbreaks that plague inland freshwaters. But now with these discharges from the freshwater they say freshwater loosely from the freshwater Lake Okeechobee, you know, they breathe. They bring these toxic plumes to the coasts and people are suffering financially in terms of beach closures and property values. And also in terms of human health, people are getting sick, this stuff is liver toxin, it can cause respiratory distress and GI issues. And there’s even an emergence, emerging concern that it could be causing or factor in higher than usual incidences of neurological diseases like ALS. I mean, there’s just didn’t, there was one study in New Hampshire where these people were living around an algae-infested lake and they had ALS levels that were way beyond anything that they would normally expect for a population that size. There’s other research going on as well. But it’s bad stuff, it kills dogs. It’s killed, like in Brazil, the toxin from this toxic algae got its way into, made its way into the water system at a dialysis center and killed like 50 people. And so it is to be trifled with. So, yeah, we’ve got this problem. And, you know, it’s, the question is, what’s the answer? And the book that I wrote isn’t prescriptive. And it’s not saying we need to do this, this, this and that. But I think it is pretty obvious at this point, that the agriculture system we’ve set up isn’t working in terms of protecting our water quality. And while we all need food, and I really, I mean, I am I dependent on the agriculture system as anybody else. And I recognize that. But we also need fresh water and right now in some places, and I think it’s going to become increasingly solidly stay on the same path. It’s going to be, you know, they’re on a collision course, our efforts to protect water and our efforts to feed humanity. And so you know, what might be an answer. I think we’re talking again, about the circle of life and being smarter about how we use this manure that, you know, we’re producing so much in terms of not just putting it on the field, because we need to get rid of it, but you process it so you can actually get, you know, the exact stuff that you can get methane out of manure which we are doing that I read a story in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year, how about how because of some legislation in California, that’s incentivizing farmers to put digesters, anaerobic digesters on their farms to process all their manure and strip the methane out of it. Some farmers are like approaching making as much money from their methane as they are their milk. And it’s not just methane, you can get out of that you can get nitrogen, you can get phosphorus and it can be packaged and sold as a product every bit as pure as anything that’s coming from a chemical factory. Or problem right now for farmers is moving that manure, once they have to take it more than 10 miles from the barn in which it was produced, it becomes a real money loser, and they can’t compete. So nobody wants to put farmers out of business. But if you have, you know, fair and well-thought-out regulations, it levels the playing field. And so we may end up paying more for certain types of products like milk or meat, but right now, and increasingly so. We’re paying in a way that we don’t even ponder, like, in my home state of Wisconsin, Lake Mendota on the edge of the University of Wisconsin campus is one of the most beautiful inland lakes that you’ll see anywhere. And it’s long been, you know, a place for students. There’s docks and decks for people to swim. There’s, you know, lifeguard station, but you go there in late summer today, there’s no lifeguard because there’s no life in the lake other than this toxic algae. And that’s the consequence of dairy operators in that watershed and the lake being overdosed with phosphorus. So that’s a real cost, like, not being able to use one of the premier natural features of a big 10 University campus. And it’s just one lake. I mean, Wisconsin’s got 1000s of lakes and you know, North America’s got 10s and 10s of 1000s of likes, and not all of them are exposed to this but a lot of them are and once you kind of start thinking about it, you start seeing all these stories and it’s just like another beach is closed. You know, another dog died. Another water system, you know, has gone out because the toxin got into the water, as it did in 2014. And Toledo, this toxic algae basically made the water of Toledo, half a million people who lived in Toledo and environs couldn’t drink the water coming out of their taps for a number of days. And they couldn’t boil it to make it safe, because that only intensifies or concentrates the toxin. So you had like the National Guard delivering baby formula to Toledo, which is a pretty grim prospect when you think that Toledo is on the edge of the world’s largest freshwater system. So there’s a lot of things at play, you know, when we think about phosphorus and what the future could hold, but I think the most important thing is for people to recognize the connection between phosphorus coming off the landscape and phosphorus, influencing toxic algae outbreaks when it hits the waters. And then what we’re growing and why, and I’ll just put this out here and leave it at that. But 40% of the corn we grow today goes towards ethanol, which nobody who’s studied the ethanol mandate, very closely, thinks that is a net environmental benefit, just because it takes so much energy to grow the corn to make that ethanol as well as processing. It also takes a lot of fertilizer inputs, and a lot of takes puts a lot of land in production that would otherwise be performing valuable ecological services as well. So Iowa loves corn, or loves ethanol, because you know, it’s been corn country. And so anybody who wants to be president united states basically has to go to Iowa at the beginning of the campaign, because that’s when they’re at the front of the primary season with their caucuses. And they basically have to pledge allegiance to ethanol. And Al Gore admitted as much when he was running, I can’t remember what year that was 2008… 2000. Anyway, he um, he admits today that that was a mistake, but he had a fondness for the Farmers of Iowa, because he had presidential ambitions. And so that’s the case with almost every candidate that goes through there. So that’s that’s likely changing with Democrats for different reasons, not phosphorus driven. But that could help maybe move us away from this ethanol program that really is, is not satisfying anybody but the producers of the ethanol.
James Connolly
I think when one of the concerns for me is that, especially when you’re talking about the biodigesters, is that become an excuse for more CAFOs? Yeah, you know, and so all the downstream, even if you’re talking about some of the advantages, advantages of utilizing these things for biogas or, you know, even just the fertilizer, you’re just gonna grow it as big as you possibly can, so that you can, you know, continue to, and then all the downstream at like, effects of that will kind of get to the environment.
Dan Egan
Yeah. If we can manage it, like the size of the farm, I mean, all that meat, and well, I can’t say that all that milk is being used, otherwise, we wouldn’t have all that cheese stored all around the country that nobody wants. But, um, you know, if these operations are regulated or managed, to the extent that they don’t send, you know, just like, you look at some of these factories, and you know, they’re right on the banks of rivers that are filled with walleye now, I mean, the industry and the environment are not mutually exclusive are tending to both. So I think there are opportunities there. But I also recognize the concern, because if you only go halfway regulating, and then you incentivize farmers to get bigger and bigger and bigger, that’s a net loser. But if you if they’re managed well, and we have a net reduction in the phosphorus discharges into our water, then it’s hard to blame the size. It’s just the way we are. But you’re not the only one who is expressed that concern to me.
James Connolly
Yeah, you are one of the stories that you tell that I thought was really interesting, because so my first job out of high school 18 to like 19, I worked at a chemical company that we use, they used, we would clean the hydraulic pumps for waste disposal and renewal in a place that was outside of New York. So we would go up, and you’d take all of the, you call it night soil in the book, but you would take all of the waste that was coming from New York City, you’d leave the water out of it, you would treat the water containing the water, you start to utilize that stuff and trucks would come in and then take that utilize it as for fertilizer. But you talk a lot about how cities are functionally changed a lot of that stuff so that especially in places like London, where they the Great Stink, created the sewer system that that really just tried to excise as much of the waste as possible. Do you see some of that stuff like starting to change within the way that we think about it?
Dan Egan
Well, yeah, I mean, in larger cities. Well, Oh, that’s why I went to Germany because they are there, you know, and they’re doing it for two reasons. When I say doing it, I’m referring to the wastewater discharge rules that are going to, you know, essentially ban any phosphorus discharges from wastewater treatment plants. And you know, we do remove a lot of it today in the United States, but there’s still a lot in there. So that is, and you know, the human waste stream is small compared to the agricultural waste stream. But it’s important because we can manage it. And it can also show us the way forward, and that way forward is already happening in Europe, in Germany, specifically, with the state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plants that are stripping. I mean, you can never get to zero, but basically all the phosphorus out of the Western, and they’re doing it to protect their water, and they’re also providing a source of fertilizer, because you’re doesn’t have any real significant phosphorus rock deposits. Which brings us back to something that I should have answered earlier, as far as, you know, how much do we have and how much is left. And so the biggest deposit that the US has, is still in Florida, but we’re extracting it at such a pace that it’s been said, we could, you know, run out of it in a matter of decades, like for decades, so, and at which point, there’s just some deposits in North Carolina and in Idaho, I’m sure we would develop an extract those, but there’s just not that, that much of this stuff around the globe. 70 to 80% of the reserves, are believed to be in Western Sahara and Morocco. And the difference between reserve and resources is significant reserves is what’s been mapped, identified and deemed suitably harvestable in terms of economics, and just logistics. So once we get hungry, I’m sure that the definition of reserve will change. Because, you know, if you’re hungry, you’re gonna, you know, you’ll do whatever it takes to get it right now, I mean, somebody estimated back in 2011, an Australian researcher that the world’s basically, its phosphorus rock deposits would play out in 70 to 80 years, which most people think is very, very pessimistic. And they say, you know, we could have three to 400 years worth of stuff left, but it’s not spread uniformly across the globe. So it’s like oil, you know, people are going to be competing for it, you know, maybe violently?
James Connolly
Yeah. I don’t know where to go from here, Dan. I mean, I think we’ve gone through a lot of the stuff that you’ve learned, I wanted to kind of leave a little bit on the Great Lakes, just because I think that is it’s such a wonderful book. I mean, both of them. I think you’re just doing a brilliant researcher, and great storyteller. I don’t necessarily want to get into it, maybe I can bring you on in a different time. Because I think that book is just the enthusiasm surrounded surrounding the idea of the American Mediterranean. It’s just such an interesting aspect. But I’ve never heard of that. I wonder if you kinda like preview that just a little bit, because I think it’s a really interesting story. And we can kind of leave it at that.
Dan Egan
Sure. So this phosphorus, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus in a World Out of Balance came out just in March 7, but six years earlier, on March 7, my first book came out called The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And it’s basically a natural history of the lakes, really focusing on what’s happened since the 1950s, which is when we opened up the lakes that were once isolated. So there’s five great lakes: Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario. And when you look at a map, you just see these big blue blobs, and a lot of people mistakenly think that they’re just static bodies of water, like, you know, like little oceans, but they’re really a big river, and they flow out to sea over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence River and out to the ocean. So there was a connection for these lakes to flow out to the world, but because of Niagara Falls, and because of the volume of water coming down the St. Lawrence River, the lakes were really isolated biologically from the outside world. There’s isolators, like a pond in the North Woods of Wisconsin. But then we opened up this nautical highway called the St. Lawrence Seaway to bring in vessels from around the world to try to turn ports like Milwaukee and Chicago into something that could rival anything on the ocean coasts. And so we opened this up, and they did it by building canals and locks and channels, just basically, who is a nautical highway for these boats. It opened in 1959. And unfortunately, like, right when it opened, the size of the average US freighter was just exploding because that was at the dawn of the container age, so which contain freighters are much bigger so so the system of locks dams, channels, and canals called the St. Lawrence Seaway is real They built for another era. So we get the boats of big I’m sitting here at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences, we’re in a fellow, it’s on harbor in Milwaukee. And I can look out, and there are no boats there right now, but they’re big. They’re like, who, I mean, the ones that sail out the Seaway, they’re, I think about 750 feet long, 80 feet wide. But that’s small compared to modern, modern shipping. Anyway, we opened up the lakes to these boats in, we didn’t get the traffic that we hoped for. But we did get stuff that we didn’t think about. And that was all the pollution, the biological pollution that these boats were bringing in. And there, they used ballast tanks to study there themselves. And those tanks can be filled with whatever life was teeming in the waters of their last court, which could be on the other side of the globe. So it’s just radically altered the whole ecology of the Great Lakes, you know, the bottom of the Great Lakes right now looks more like the Caspian Sea, than the lakes that, you know, the French, and the early white explorers and the Native Americans before them experienced. So it’s just kind of the ecological unraveling, and then stitching back together of the Great Lakes, with a lot of people, a lot of stuff.
James Connolly
Yeah, I think that a greeting these two in tandem were just a really great access to the way that you were thinking about both of both of these stories. Well, thank you. I mean, really, thank you so much for spending the time. Everything that you’ve told me so far, is so beautifully told in the book, that I really highly recommend anybody who is involved in agriculture, who cares about where their food is coming from New cares about the way that we’ve sort of moved all of these different elements around, you know, in order to sort of create our industrial age, the sort of like downstream ramification literal, downstream and kick it since all problem solving that we do that creates more problems. But thank you so much for coming on. So, Dan, you’re on Twitter: Daniel, Patrick, you can I believe that…
James Connolly
@DanPatrickEgan.
Dan Egan
And then I just want to mention the book again, The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus in a World out of Balance, and the book prior to that was called The Death and the Life of the Great Lakes. But thank you so much. Yeah.
Dan Egan
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Diana Rodgers, RD
Thanks so much for listening today and for following my work. If you believe in making sure that people all over the world should have access to nutritious food, please join my mission through my non-profit, the Global Food Justice Alliance. Visit sustainabledish.com/join and become a sustaining member today. All sustaining members get early access to ad-free podcasts plus free downloads, and you’ll be helping get healthy protein like meat, fish, and eggs to food-insecure kids. That’s sustainabledish.com/join. And thank you.
