Ways to combat higher fertilizer prices and sustaining ourselves in the long run.

Good evening folks! How are you? I'm looking for ways to combat higher fertilizer prices in an organic fashion without the chemical types and help others cope with the uncertainty in the world right now.
How can we create fertilizer for commercial use without chemicals and help grow crops quickly into autumn? I wanna help my community and others as much as possible. Please reach me on this forum if you need me. Good night!

Compost is the obvious one but takes time to build up. Shorter term, growing legumes as a cover crop and cutting them in before they set seed adds nitrogen without buying anything. Nettles steeped in water make a decent liquid feed too, and if you have access to wood ash that adds potassium. None of it replaces a full fertility programme overnight but it does reduce how much you need to buy in.

I would add that many cities/municipalities have massive composting programs, with the intent of keeping as much kitchen and yard waste out of the landfills as they can (to extend their useful life, and reduce methane emissions).

Usually, the resulting compost is free. I know, I know, it's not organic. But it is available right now, for free. Personally I mix the "city compost" I pick up with biochar and my rough compost and other magic ingredients, letting it cook in an anaerobic slurry for a bit, in the hope of mitigating any chem nasties. I haven't had a problem so far but I'm careful.

Pee!
in that fall,top your beds with wood chips or leaves, then add pee.
Pour it right on.
Also a good a good substance for charging biochar.
One poster here used it in subirrigated planters for growing corn!


Another source of nutrients im bullish on is water plants.
They put on mass very fast, relative to most plants, but they won't root and compete with your crop, unlike the most vivacious terrestrial plants.
I've used water lettuce in the past, because it was available.
This year I'm setting up a barrel of duckweed at the community garden,as source of "scoop and drop" green manure.

I recently made a thread that looks at the possibility of quickly replacing the need for nitrogen fertiliser by adding more legume years to the crop rotation -

Can changes in crop rotation allow big ag to eliminate the need for synthetic fertiliser?

In short, it seems that yes, it can be done. This post in particular discusses a paper that looks at Integrating legumes to enhance cereal production: The relative inputs of fertiliser nitrogen and legume biological nitrogen fixation in major wheat and maize producing countries

This chart was very interesting in that paper



The final column shows the additional legume area required to make up the nitrogen shortfall, and in some places, like the USA, it's around 25%. Which is quite do-able by switching out one year of wheat or corn growing with a year of growing peas or beans.

My general take on the whole thing was that big ag could cope perfectly well without nitrogen fertiliser if we just ate more beans.

For small scale growing it's relatively easy to incorporate the use of urine, composting, gathering leaves and grass cuttings to use as mulch, that sort of thing. But it seems that a simple change in our diets to increase peas and beans and reduce wheat and corn would keep the food supply from Big Ag secure too.

In short, eat more beans!

The way I would combat higher fertilizer prices and sustaining ourselves in the long run would be to use compost tea.  Have you tried that?

How can we create fertilizer for commercial use without chemicals and help grow crops quickly into autumn?

I'm not sure if there is an easy plug and play replacement for existing commercial fertilizers but I think a way around that issue is to get buy in from folks into the idea of healthy living soils. If we encourage the improvement of soil through increasing both soil biota diversity and increasing organic matter we can achieve comparable yields to conventional growing systems.  The only thing that may be frustrating for some is that this is not an overnight process. It takes time and effort to improve soil through living roots and compost amendments.

I think the solution is a combination of two primary approaches: 1) accept lower yield and 2) breed plants that don't rely on inputs.



I don't much care what fertilizer prices do because I don't use any.