Air Fertilizer®
An all-new, zero-carbon organic fertilizer
While the demand for food and crops continues to increase in proportion to ongoing global population growth, climate and environmental change caused by greenhouse gases and other factors now threaten to reduce food productivity.
The agricultural industry has historically relied on various chemical fertilizers to accelerate crop production, but their overuse can lead to a decline in soil quality. Furthermore, chemical fertilizers primarily consist of nitrogen compounds produced by the Haber-Bosch process, an industrial procedure developed at the beginning of the 20th century that has underpinned agricultural production ever since, but which results in extremely high energy consumption.
For these reasons, there have been calls in recent years for a shift to more sustainable organic fertilizers. This approach is not without issues, however: while existing organic fertilizers are highly sustainable, it can be difficult to determine their suitability for a given environment and to ensure that their effect on crops is being maximized.
Symbiobe’s Air Fertilizer® is an all-new zero-carbon nitrogen fertilizer that uses air as a resource, and which has the potential to address issues with current chemical and organic fertilizers.
An organic option that matches the growth potential of chemical fertilizers
At Symbiobe, we have identified the optimal environment and culture conditions for efficient production of Air Fertilizer® by marine purple photosynthetic bacteria, which have the ability to fix both nitrogen and carbon dioxide during photosynthesis. Our organisms undergo continuous cultivation in seawater conditions while exposed to light suitable for photosynthesis, and the nitrogen compounds and amino acids that they metabolize become the raw materials for Air Fertilizer®. Our proprietary patent-pending production technology then converts these materials into a powder that maintains the composition of amino acids necessary for activating plant growth.
With a growth-enabling nitrogen content of 11%, and a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of approximately 4:1 (an indicator of fertilizer effectiveness; lower is better, with most fertilizers aiming for a ratio of 10 or less), Air Fertilizer® is a highly pure and well-balanced organic fertilizer.
Testing of an Air Fertilizer® prototype on komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach) and broccoli demonstrated excellent growth potential, which suggests that Air Fertilizer® can serve as a compelling alternative to conventional fertilizers. Accordingly, the first step in our efforts to take these results from the laboratory to the real world is to promote and develop the potential of this novel organic fertilizer, thereby helping drive its adoption as an indispensable tool in next-generation agriculture and agroecology.
Our advertisement feature in the online version of Nature
A novel fertilizer with a reduced carbon footprint
Our advertisement feature ‘A novel fertilizer with a reduced carbon footprint’ was published on 11 July 2024, as part of Focal Point on Building a Carbon-Neutral Society in the online version of Nature, a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in science and technology.
