These Tomatoes are Fighting Climate Change

Guest post by Cohort 2020 Fellows Jay Schwalbe and Joshua McEnaney

When we committed ourselves to bringing our technological research to market, co-founding Nitricity based on our conviction that a new approach to fertilizer production will mitigate global carbon dioxide emissions on a gigaton scale, we expected the biggest hurdles would include translating our technology from the bench-top to the farm. What we didn’t anticipate was having to face-off against desert heat, black widows, and wasps!

Those are among the workplace hazards, lurking in and around a storage shed, which we encountered this summer in an otherwise excellent field trial of our technology at a research farm in Fresno, California, through a collaboration with the Center for Irrigation Technology at Fresno State. But the great result was well worth the risk. Our fertilizer application produced a crop of tomatoes with a yield that matched the control crop, demonstrating that farmers can use our technology without reducing their crop output. What’s more, we applied 40 percent less nitrogen than the traditional method, indicating that at scale, we have an opportunity to save farmers money.

“We applied 40 percent less nitrogen than the traditional method, indicating that at scale, we have an opportunity to save farmers money. ”

But when we zoom out from the field and look at the greater significance of this field test, it shows that we are progressing on our mission to decarbonize nitrogen fertilizer. That crop of tomatoes, in other words, is fighting climate change.

Nitricity’s research field

Here’s why: Today, nitrogen fertilizer production, distribution, and application are unsustainable, causing as much as 6 percent of global CO₂eq emissions, and representing a 2.8 gigaton mitigation opportunity to combat climate change. To make the fertilizer most farmers use today, natural gas, generally produced via hydraulic fracturing (fracking), powers a system for fixing nitrogen from the air. This produces fertilizer on a massive scale and through a vast global distribution network that generates more than 1.6 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions each year. For the farms that convert to Nitricity systems, which produce nitrogen fertilizer on-demand using just air, water, and electricity, we can mitigate as much as 80 percent of the CO₂eq emissions associated with nitrogen fertilizer.

Additionally, nitrate runoff and NOx emissions from agricultural fields cause significant environmental and conservation issues beyond climate change, including algal blooms, contaminated water supplies, and smog. To solve these problems, we are developing distributed, on-site systems, which produce nitrogen fertilizer from air, water and renewable electricity- allowing farms to efficiently fertilize themselves.

“For the farms that convert to Nitricity systems ... we can mitigate as much as 80 percent of the CO₂eq emissions associated with nitrogen fertilizer. ”

Through the Valley Ventures accelerator program at the Water, Energy, and Technology (WET) Center in Fresno State we were able to land a paid test at the Center for Irrigation Technology. This gave us a great opportunity to see how our technology would look on an actual farm. For our future customers, among the most important things we learned were about how to connect to irrigation systems. We were able to sort through the various regulations and best practices to get a set of hardware that reliably injects our fertilizer directly into the irrigation system. This reduces the labor cost of application and allows for high frequency fertilization, one strategy to reduce nitrogen runoff and a big value add for us.

Unsurprisingly, we also made a lot of progress on our core tech during the field trial. We iterated every part of the system and kept track of how it impacted our reliability and overall efficiency. We were able to isolate certain parts of our power supply chain—the part that takes the electricity from solar panels and powers our reactor—that had a huge impact on our reliability and efficiency. We ended up with an off-the-shelf solution that used about 4 different power transformations. In the future, we look forward to simplifying this sub-system. As luck would have it, we actually found the best improvement the day we harvested the tomatoes!

Our yields were reasonable on a per-acre basis, but this wasn’t a full scale test. Compared to a typical commercial farming operation, we grew a modest amount of thick-walled, processing tomatoes. But, it was still a massive amount to us! We had tomato on bagels for lunch … and tomato based stews for dinner .. and tomato in everything for a week or two. Josh made the best salsa! We also donated two boxes to the Fresno State student cupboard. These processing tomatoes don’t carry the same cachet as heirloom tomatoes, but honestly they taste quite good.

Since the harvest, we have been busy building a system that can support fertilizer production and application on a field 25 times the size of this summer’s research pilot, which will go on our first commercial farm by Spring of 2021. We’re also working with our collaborators from CIT on a research paper intended to share details of the research pilot and we hope to publish that with the irrigation innovation consortium and present it at a conference to be announced. And down in Fresno, every season is a growing season, so we are continuing to study our system by growing broccoli (sans wasps) in the same plot. We’re looking forward to sharing the bounty with those in need—and making some broccoli slaw, as well.