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Speaker 1: dot com slash stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff works dot com where smart Happens. Hi, I'm Marshall

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Speaker 1: Brain with today's question, what is fertilizer and why do

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Speaker 1: plants need it? In order for a plant to grow

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Speaker 1: and thrive, it needs a number of different chemical elements.

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Speaker 1: The most important break into four categories. First, there's carbon,

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Speaker 1: hydrogen and oxygen, which are available from air and water

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Speaker 1: and they're in plentiful supply. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium or next.

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Speaker 1: These three macro nutrients are what you find in packaged fertilizer.

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Speaker 1: Then there's sulfur, calcium, and magnesium. These are called secondary nutrients.

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Speaker 1: And finally there's boron, cobalt, copper, and things like that.

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Speaker 1: They're called micronutrients. The most important of these, the ones

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Speaker 1: that are needed in the largest quantity by a plant,

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Speaker 1: are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. These three chemicals are important

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Speaker 1: because they're necessary as basic building blocks like amino acids,

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Speaker 1: cell membranes, and a TP. For example, every amino acid

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Speaker 1: contains nitrogen. Every molecule making up every cell's membrane contains phosphorus.

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Speaker 1: The membrane molecules are called phosphoe lipids, and so does

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Speaker 1: every molecule of a t P, which is the main

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Speaker 1: energy source for all cells. Potassium makes up one to

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Speaker 1: two percent of the weight of any plant, and as

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Speaker 1: an ion in cells, it's essential to metabolism. Without nitrogen,

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Speaker 1: phosphorus and potassium, the plant simply cannot grow because it

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Speaker 1: can't make the pieces it needs. It's like a car

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Speaker 1: factory running out of steel or a road crew running

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Speaker 1: out of asphalt. To make plants grow faster, what need

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Speaker 1: to do is supply the elements that the plants need

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Speaker 1: in readily available forms. That's the goal of fertilizer. Most

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Speaker 1: fertilizers supply just nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium because the other

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Speaker 1: chemicals are needed in much lower quantities and are generally

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Speaker 1: available in most soils. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium availability is

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Speaker 1: the big limit to growth for plants, So why don't

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Speaker 1: people need fertilizers to grow because we get everything we

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Speaker 1: need from the plants we eat or from the meat

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Speaker 1: of animals that eat plants. Plants are factories that do

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Speaker 1: all the work to process the basic elements of life

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Speaker 1: and make them available to us. For more on this

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Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, is it how staff works

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