新托福閱讀解析:Soil Fertilization土壤施肥

　　Fertilizers partially restore plant nutrients lost by erosion, crop harvesting, and leaching. Fanners can use either organic fertilizer from plant and animal materials or commercial inorganic fertilizer produced from various minerals. Three basic types of organic fertilizer are animal manure, green manure, and compost. Animal manure includes the waste matter of cattle, horses, poultry, and other farm animals. It improves soil structure, adds organic nitrogen, and stimulates beneficial soil bacteria and fungi.

　　Despite its effectiveness, the use of animal manure in the United States has decreased. There are three reasons for this: the replacement of most mixed animal-raising and crop-farming operations with separate operations for growing crops and raising animals, the high costs of transporting animal manure from feedlots near urban areas to distant rural crop-growing areas, and the replacement of horses and other draft animals that added manure to the soil with tractors and other motorized farm machinery.

　　Green manure is fresh or growing green vegetation plowed into the soil to increase the organic matter and humus (degraded organic matter) available to the next crop. Compost is a sweet-smelling, dark-brown, humusiike material that is rich in organic matter and soil nutrients. It is produced when microorganisms in soil (mostly fungi and aerobic bacteria) break down organic matter such as leaves, food wastes, paper, and wood in the presence of oxygen. Compost is a rich natural fertilizer and soil conditioner that aerates soil, improves its ability to retain water and nutrients, helps prevent erosion, and prevents nutrients from being wasted by being dumped in landfills. Compost is produced by piling up alternating layers of nitrogen-rich wastes (such as grass clippings, weeds, animal manure, and vegetable kitchen scraps), carbon-rich plant wastes (dead leaves, hay, straw, sawdust), and topsoil. Compost provides a home for microorganisms that help decompose plant and manure layers and reduces the amount of plant wastes taken to landfills and incinerators.

　　Another form of organic fertilizer is the spores of mushrooms, puffballs, and truffles. Rapidly growing and spreading mycorrhizae fungi in the spores attach to plant roots and help them take in moisture and nutrients from the soil. Unlike typical fertilizers that must be applied every few weeks, one application of mushroom fungi lasts all year and costs just pennies per plant. The fungi also produce a bigger root system, which makes plants more disease resistant.

　　Com, tobacco, and cotton can deplete the topsoil of nutrients, especially nitrogen, if planted on the same land several years in a row. One way to reduce such losses is crop rotation. Fanners plant areas or strips with nutrient-depleting crops one year. In the next year they plant the same areas with legumes, whose root nodules add nitrogen to the soil. In addition to helping restore soil nutrients, this method reduces erosion by keeping the soil covered with vegetation and helps reduce crop losses to insects by presenting them with a changing target.

　　Today, many farmers rely on commercial inorganic fertilizers containing nitrogen (as ammonium ions, nitrate ions, or urea), phosphorus (as phosphate ions), and potassium (as potassium ions). Inorganic commercial fertilizers are easily transported, stored, and applied. Worldwide, their use increased about tenfold between 1950 and 1989 but declined by 12% between 1990 and 1999. Today, the additional food they help produce feeds one of every three people in the world, without them, world food output, would drop an estimated 40%.

　　Commercial inorganic fertilizers have some disadvantages, however. These include (1) not adding humus to the soil, (2) reducing the soil’s content of organic matter and thus its ability to hold water (unless animal manure and green manure arc also added to the soil), (3) lowering the oxygen content of soil and keeping fertilizer from being taken up as efficiently, (4) typically supplying only two or three of the twenty or so nutrients needed by plants, and (5) releasing nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that can enhance global warming. The widespread use of commercial inorganic fertilizers, especially on sloped land near streams and lakes, also causes water pollution as nitrate and phosphate fertilizer nutrients are washed into nearby bodies of water. The resulting plant nutrient enrichment causes algae blooms that use up oxygen dissolved in the water, thereby killing fish.

　　詞匯題：

　　beneficial=helpful 有利的，有幫助作用的

　　rely=depend 依靠依賴

　　twenty or so=roughly twenty 二十左右