With the weather of the spring season, losing nitrogen from our farm fields isn’t just a worry, but rather an unwelcome reality. However, using the word “lost” to describe where your nitrogen (N) has gone isn’t really a good description of what is happening to the N nutrients in your soil. The nitrogen cycle can help provide some perspective to better understand where exactly your N is “lost” to.
While nitrogen is deposited into the soil by a number of different pathways including nitrogen fertilizer, nitrogen fixation by leguminous crops, manure additions, and crop residues, there are fewer ways that nitrogen can be lost from the soil, like leaching, denitrification and volatilization. Regardless, nitrogen can be easily lost from the soil and be unavailable for crop growth. The nitrogen cycle displayed in the included diagram shows how these pathways are connected through a series of biological and chemical reactions.
Nitrogen Cycle
