Wednesday, February 14, 2024 — 10:10 – 10:50 a.m. 

Phosphorus (P) is a nutrient that is essential for all forms of life, including all of our agricultural crops, as well as for the people and other animals that depend on the food and feed that farmers grow for them. In Manitoba, most farm fields are deficient in P and require applications of P as livestock manure or synthetic fertilizer to improve or maintain productivity. On the other hand, some fields and/or areas of fields in Manitoba have more P than they require agronomically, increasing the risk of substantial losses of P in runoff and the subsequent risk of downstream water quality problems.  Furthermore, our farms, like most others in the world, are very dependent on phosphate fertilizers and feed supplements that are manufactured from phosphate rock … a non-renewable resource that’s concentrated in commercially minable quantities in only a few areas of the world.

To address these types of sustainability issues we must recognize the essential roles that the P cycle and P balances within that cycle play and manage those processes accordingly.  Within our farms, we must continue to refine our efforts to balance P application with removal, using the best available (e.g., 4R) nutrient management practices.  And we also need to employ more widespread and more careful recycling of P throughout the whole food system … not only on our farms where most of our food is produced, but also in the towns and cities where most of our food is consumed