Page 31 - Pivot Bio News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Today, let’s look at an alternative to carpet-bombing Midwestern corn fields with around 150 pounds per acre of nitrogen fertilizer, in hopes that the plants will take up about half of that, en route to a big corn yield. Leaving aside the debate over what happens to runoff nitrogen as it enters the rivers of America — there’s the question of cost, and could we do better on cost? After all, the cost of nitrogen can head up to nearly 40 cents per pound, and the resulting $60 an acre cost for fertilizer inputs is a target that farmers and technologists look a...

Photo credit: Gil Gullickson There once was a microbe attached to corn roots in a Missouri cornfield teeming with zillions of other microscopic microbes. This microbe differed from the others, though. It nabbed atmospheric nitrogen (N) to make ammonia that helps corn plants grow and yield more bushels. Sound like a fairy tale? It’s reality, say officials for Pivot Bio, an agricultural microbial firm. “We isolated that naturally occurring bacteria from the corn roots,” says Ernie Sanders, Pivot Bio vice president of product development. Then, Pivot Bio scientists determined this ...