Ok, so we have all these enormous factory farms full of animals who produce fertilizer quite naturally. All we have to do is give them nutritious feed and better lives so they are spared disease. Why can't Big Agriculture pivot to actually using the poop that these animals produce?
Small farmer here. Most of my fertilizer comes from the rear end of my animals. They choose where to apply it, and my free range birds spread it around a bit. I would not try to spread it any other way. I try to avoid man made inputs, but the land is still far less productive than the few times I have applied synthetic fertilizers.
Big Ag invests in machines that each cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Those machines are tuned to spread powdered/pelletized fertilizer that comes from a factory. It would be prohibitively expensive to pivot to machines that can collect and spread manure, and the results would be suboptimal compared to their usual inputs. It is simply not worth the cost, as it would put them at a disadvantage to those who do not switch over. The shortage will pass long before they could pay off the investment.
