So here's some inorganic life.

This is an inorganic tube.

And they contain liquid fertilizer.

The smell of gasoline, of fertilizer.

And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world.

You never bring in fertilizer and chemicals?

And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology.

So this is these are fertilizer gas plants.

This time it's by turning it into chemical fertilizer.

No plowing, no fertilizer, no pesticide, and no weeding.

Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas?

And, we never bring in definitely no fertilizer and chemicals.

Chemical composition with an organized structure of a natural inorganic origin. gt gt Narrator

So we're thinking that the fertilizer with it has phosphate ions,

What also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains, and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain, farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market, not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent.

So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting.

Break up carbon dioxide and dissociate water. Make fertilizer, grow crops, all that.

It's produced in the fertilizer industry it's produced in the chemical manufacturing industry.

And it's never been ploughed or dosed with synthetic fertilizer, yet it's clearly thriving.

like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips.

So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules.

The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it.

They also used the flesh as well, for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks.

In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats.

Over 95 of all the food grown in this country is totally reliant on synthetic fertilizer.

African farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, compared to 144 in Asia.

Then, we take this pipe with very tiny holes, which slowly let out nutrients from the fertilizer.

And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life.

It's also a fertilizer. Ammonia production consumes more than one percent of the entire world energy budget today.

Some is used as a organic fertilizer, some is used as a biodiesel ingredient, but most of it gets recycled.

And for the nutrients, chemical fertilizers... and at the moment most of the farmers' fertilizer is derived from natural gas.

'cause that's what fertilizer's made of, but it also has other impurities, other chemicals, that are added to the fertilizer.

And if we jam nutrients, sewage, fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid, it can back up all through it.

Their excrement is absolutely teeming with microbes, which continue the decomposition process, making all those once wasted nutrients available again as fertilizer.

And it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer.

You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control, whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice.

There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less.

The algae that grow produce oxygen, as I've mentioned, and they also produce biofuels and fertilizer and food and other bi algal products of interest.

So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees, the crop fertilizer.

And then we give it a second gene to grow an inorganic material that can be used to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, that can be used for clean fuels.

Many communities use composting as part of zero waste strategies, and they can sell their worm eaten table scraps to local farms, hungry for rich fertilizer.

And that works as long as we have the cheap fossil fuels with which to make the nitrogen fertilizer and to transport all the inputs and so on.

These red wigglers are surface dwellers who don't burrow too deep, they're optimal feeders around room temperature, and they're well suited to converting organic waste into usable fertilizer.

Cancer cells mutate, and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer.

And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals, fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom and there's your pea soup.