28.08.2025 – Europe’s environment is contaminated with nitrogen. Nitrogen is actually a nutrient for plants, animals and also people. That is why it is the main component of synthetic fertilizers. But as with so many things it depends on the crowd.
Biodiversity reduces too much nitrogen and contaminates air, groundwater and floors. In waters, this leads to a lack of oxygen and thus to fish and plant death, and also to the disappearance of certain plant species in the soil. Nitrogen dioxides contribute to the fine dust pollution and formation of ozone near the ground, and the nitrous gas (stalking monoxide) released during fertilization contributes directly to the climate crisis as greenhouse gas.
It gets stuffy
Between the 1950s and the 1990s, global crop yields initially doubled through the mass use of fertilizer. Even today, the use of fertilizer per hectare continues to increase, although yields hardly increase. In many regions, a structural -low agriculture with monocultures and large areas is also operated without hedges. Crop rotations are not changed in the extension, which requires ever higher use of nitrogen and pesticides.
In the meantime there is clearly too much nitrogen in the environment. This can be read in the ground, because nitrogen surpluses can be measured there. The amount of nitrogen, which is supplied to the soil, for example via artificial fertilizer or manure, minus the nitrogen, which is withdrawn from the soil, for example through plant growth, results in the nitrogen surplus. This can be determined, among other things, through so -called fabric power balance sheets. In these, agricultural companies make transparent which nutrients they use and lead to the environment. However, the federal government has recently overturned the creation of material electricity balance sheets that has been mandatory in Germany.
Less fertilize
In the Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy as part of the Green Deal, the EU originally set the goal of at least halving nutrient losses by 2030. The EU countries should use 20 percent less chemical fertilizers. However, calculations by the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ) show that the uniform waiver of fertilizer is not sufficient.
“While the nitrogen surplus was relatively low until the middle of the 20th century, it increased significantly after the Second World War and achieved top values through the increased use of artificial fertilizers until the mid-1980s,” says Masooma Batool, UFZ data analyst and first author of both the current papers and a corresponding previous study three years ago. At the end of the 1980s, the nitrogen surplus then decreased noticeably-as a result of the EU Nitratrichts, reforms of common agricultural policy (GAP) as well as economic and political changes. In addition, technological progress such as more precise fertilization. The nitrogen surplus has been at a high level since the 2010s.
Fertilize much less
Based on the nitrogen surpluses from 2015 to 2019, the research team concludes that reducing the use of mineral fertilizers reduces at least 20 percent of the nitrogen surplus in the soil. Instead of the targeted halving, only a reduction of 10 to 16 percent can be expected.
“The agricultural regions of Europe differ in the use of land, the intensity of nitrogen use and the technologies used. According to our calculations, a uniform EU-wide reduction of the mineral fertilizer, as is anchored in the F2F strategy, does not bring the desired result,” explains Rohini Kumar, co-author and UFZ hydrosystem modeler.
“According to our calculations, Germany’s farmers-provided the application of modern technologies and management measures-would have to reduce the mineral fertilizer by 20 percent and additionally 50 percent,” says Masooma Batool. If you do not modernize technologies and cultivation, you would have to spend 67 percent less manure. However, this reduction also causes a loss of earnings: in modern technologies and management measures by 17 percent, in the common ones that are common today. So fewer food and feed would be generated.
Now it is in the hands of politics to develop strategies how both environmental goals can reach and can be secured by adequate agricultural production, Kumar sums up. Valuable approaches can be found in strategies of preserving and ecological agriculture, which can significantly reduce the use of fertilizer with oral seeds of legumes without losing harvests. jb
