Mucking it out

Those of you who follow my gardening endeavours know that I have a special relationship with fertilisers. The soil in our garden is quite poor and Some Members of the Family have a problem with the smell of manure so we have been using synthetic fertilisers almost exclusively. Yet that may change very soon and I will be having a good laugh because… Well, you might need to sit down for this.

Europe seeks to replace imported Russian fertilisers with local manure, the Financial Times reported a few days ago and may I take this opportunity to say that the FT has become an even bigger treasure trove of transition insanity than Euractiv. Anyway, per that report, “Christophe Hansen, the bloc’s agriculture commissioner, told journalists that manure-based fertiliser could reduce dependency on imported chemical fertilisers, and was cheaper than artificial equivalents, which require a lot of energy to produce.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I am stunned. It appears that the European Union has been so happy with the results of its crusade against modernity that it wants to go all the way in sending us all back to pre-industrial times — even if this stands at direct odds with its emission reduction efforts. Methane emission reduction efforts, to be precise. Methane emissions from livestock, to be even more precise.

In a nutshell, because I’ve beaten around this bush enough: the EU wants to cull cows because they belch. But it also wants to use the waste product of these cows to replace chemical fertilisers because local ones are too expensive — for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the transition, of course — and a lot of the imported ones are produced by Russia. Dung it is. Lots of it.

Let me first refer you to a press release by Fertilizers Europe from last November. In that press release, the industry association urged the European Commission “to take a decisive action on surging imports of Russian and Belarusian fertilizers to the EU.”

The fertiliser industry in Europe cannot compete with what they like to call “state-subsidised” and “state-controlled” gas prices in Russia that result in cheap fertilisers. What gas prices in Russia are, in fact, is low because the country is producing a lot of the stuff and the ones producing it are state companies. The more pertinent question, however, is how the European fertiliser industry lost its competitiveness. It’s because of a number and that number is 42.5%.