There was a little glimmer of hope at the start of the week, when the combination of a couple of days with a smidge less rain than normal and a hint of a drying wind granted the first opportunity in a while for many to get on with a bit of work on the land.

Playing catch-up whenever there’s a chance has certainly been the name of the game this year - but the beginning of the week was the first time that it felt even a wee bit like spring might be somewhere round the corner.

But even that slight prospect has been enough to lift the mood - for few would argue that we seem to have been stuck in one of the glummest ever back-ends and winters up the middle of Scotland’s arable belt, with Fife, Perthshire, Angus and some of the North East having suffered an unrelenting serving of dreichness of which few can remember the equal.

Anyhoo, it was certainly the first chance we’ve had to have all three tractors out and getting on with some landwork since the wheat went in, for better or for worse, back just before the October deluges began to hit.

And while the ground is still some way off being anywhere near dry enough, thoughts have begun to turn to the driller – and, with much of the closing stages of the wheat campaign blanked from our minds, whether or not we’d had the heart to do the usual cleaning and maintenance before it went back into the shed.

But for a few days at least, the crocuses were out, the birds were singing, there was that smell the earth gives off when it’s asking to be ploughed and, as long as the wheat fields were out of sight, there was just enough of a watery blink of sunshine to raise the spirits and allow a sliver of hopefulness to peak out from behind the last few month’s constancy of storm clouds.

Unbridled optimism

But, lest I’m accused of succumbing to a fit of unbridled optimism – and in the process jinxing any prospect of a good settled spell, maybe it’s time to move on to other topics…

Now by far the vast majority of us rely on nitrogen fertilisers to optimise the yields of our crops – and the ready availability of these products has allowed farming to feed many millions more hungry mouths than would have been the case without them.

But, with the production of bagged fertiliser requiring a heavy input of fuel and energy – and the fact that the emissions of nitrous oxide which can occur if fertilisers aren’t used judiciously lead the arable sector’s greenhouse gas emissions (due to the fact that it’s reckoned to have 298 times the warming potential of CO2) – the use of man-made nitrogen fertiliser has inevitably become the subject of close scrutiny.

So it’s worth taking a bit of a look into the history behind its development and use - and reminding ourselves that it’s reckoned that without artificial fertilisers, we’d only probably only be able to feed half the world’s current population.

Now the beneficial effects of animal dung had long been appreciated in boosting crop yields – but back in the nineteenth century the discovery that the enormous deposits of centuries-old bird droppings, known as guano, on some of the islands off South America could turbo-charge crop growth led to a huge, world-wide trade in this smelly but effective product.

However, such was the demand for this guano in improving crop yields around the world that after some decades all available supplies became pretty much used up. For a while after this, geological reserves of Chilean nitrate mined from the Atacama desert, helped fill the gap

Widespread starvation

But as the twentieth century approached, there were real fears that these too would become exhausted and that agricultural production would slump, leading to widespread starvation and famine which would cause the sort of collapse in the human population which had been predicted by the philosopher and economist, Thomas Malthus, a century before.

So the race was on to find either a new source or a way of synthesising nitrates on the sort of industrial scale which would allow crop yields to be maintained.

With Germany then being the pre-eminent nation in the field of chemistry, the scientist Fritz Haber discovered a process which, later refined by Carl Bosch, allowed the commercial synthesis of ammonium nitrate through what has ever since been termed the Haber-Bosch process.

And while the process might also have helped provide the large quantities of nitrates required for German munitions during the major conflicts of the 20th century, there is no escaping the fact that the process has fed billions of people around the world for the past 100 years.

However, as was mentioned earlier, that benefit doesn’t come without a cost – and, as the Haber-Bosch process needs to be run at high temperatures and high pressures (between 400 and 500 degrees Celsius and between 100 and 300 bar of pressure) it is extremely energy demanding, and represents a major call on fossil fuel.

Price worth paying

And it’s been calculated that today’s synthetic fertiliser production accounts for more than 3% of total global greenhouse gas emissions – and while you might argue that it might be a price worth paying to feed almost half the world’s population, it is becoming a target for climate activists.

So, once again, the search is on to find new and better ways of producing nitrogen fertilisers which will be more sustainable in the long run.

In recent months this has seen some of the world’s big fertiliser companies move to utilising renewables as their energy source – and just last week the fertiliser giant Yara signed a deal which would see it buy 100,000t of renewable ammonia a year from a project in Oman.

But while transferring the ability of plants like legumes to fix their own nitrogen to a wider range of food crops might be the ultimate goal, synthetic production in some form is likely to remain hugely important for the foreseeable future.

So, with the race now firmly on again, a large number of ideas are currently being explored around the world as researchers and companies try to become the first to come up with a new solution.

And just last week I was interested to hear that a novel approach was currently being investigated in the UK, with trials being undertaken at the country’s Agri-Tech Centres which help innovative start-ups secure funding, and provide access to research facilities to test, demonstrate and validate new ideas.

Revolutionise production

Using technology which harnesses the ability of lightning to fix nitrogen from the air, the innovative start-up Debye Ltd hopes to revolutionise fertiliser production and supply – and cut carbon emissions and support soil health.

The proposed system simulates lightning’s ability to capture nitrogen in the form of nitrates when it strikes water. If the tests prove successful, Debye envisage that it will be possible to set up modular and containerised systems sited on farms or hubs, giving farmers on-the-spot or local supply of nitrate-based fertiliser using only air, water and electricity from renewable resources. And while a chemist tells me that nitric acid is likely to be what’s produced in the first instance, I’ve no idea if this is going to be subjected to further reactions to make it more user-friendly.

But while the end product is likely to be very different from the ammonium nitrate we commonly use, the 18-month feasibility R and D will measure its environmental and economical sustainability at each stage of its development – and the initial objective is to develop a one-kilowatt proof-of-concept prototype, to quantify and compare crop yields and post-harvest properties for standard nitrogen fertiliser and fertiliser produced by Debye Ltd.’s machine and to determine its commercial viability.

If the trial is successful, Debye has said it could undertake small-scale pilot projects on a farm setting within three years, subject to funding.

So maybe I’m not the only one given to the occasional fit of optimism…