Phosphorus

So, moving on to the phosphorus cycle.

The interesting thing about phosphorus is that it's the only element that we're going to talk about that doesn't involve the atmosphere.

Phosphorus wants nothing to do with your air.

However, the lithosphere, fancy word for the Earth's crust, is amply supplied with phosphorus.

Rocks contain inorganic phosphates, especially sedimentary rocks that originated in old ocean floors and lakebeds where living things died and sank to the bottom, where their phosphorus-rich bodies piled up and made phosphorus-rich rocks over time.

Lucifer is really, really interesting because it actually comes from the, well, let me go back to the beginning.

The original Greek was called Phosphorus and Phosphorus was transliterated into Latin and it became Lucifer.

Now, the phosphorus meaning actually is the light bearer, which was also known as Venus.

We know that because a few thousand years ago, Venus did a flyby.

Nitrogen has to move from atmosphere to plants, to animals, to waste, to soil, to atmosphere.

Phosphorus has to move from stored rock to plants, to bodies to waste, to recovered fertilizer to plants again.

Carbon has to move between the atmosphere and the biosphere at a rate that keeps oxygen and carbon dioxide in balance.

Sulphur, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, and dozens of trace elements all have their own cycles.

Tell us a little bit about it.

We're going to talk about Phosphorus today, but your program is set up to get some insights on products like that.

Yeah, so MyField is run in conjunction with GrowMark in the U.S., and it's all about testing new and novel products in their pre-launch year to see what they're all about.

We get some We get some first-hand knowledge on how the product performs.

What's that one? I can't read it.

Phosphorus.

Phosphorus.

Behold.

Chain.

So,

phosphorus, lime...

Phosphorus, lime...

It's the brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon, And for a substantial stretch of the ancient world, it was tracked as two separate things, a morning star, visible only just before sunrise, and an evening star, visible only just after sunset, never both in the same season.

The Greeks named the morning appearance Phosphorus and the evening appearance Hesperus and treated them as genuinely distinct bodies until Pythagoras is credited by later tradition with recognizing they were a single object on one continuous orbit.

Mesopotamian tradition ran the same duality through Inanna and Ishtar, a goddess whose character shifted with the appearance of the planet was in the sky.

The Maya never made the two-object mistake in the first place, and getting it right turned into a working military calendar.

Well, actually, the

Greek name for Lucifer is Phosphorus.

So if you have a light, Phosphorus is Lucifer.

Phosphorus is

the son of Eos.

E-O-S, Eos, whatever.

Eos is the goddess that's literally Dawn, Dawn itself.

And then her son is Phosphorus.

Um, and then you have Nat mur, obviously, is going to pop up there, digestive troubles because of the liver.

Um, and you ha- going to have Phosphorus, which is very good if there's also anemia together with the liver.

Uh, it's very good for degeneration of liver, uh, inflammation of the liver, uh, and flatulence.

You're going to look at China officinalis as well.

Okay.

Uh, Peter P. Johnson, uh, he's first time caller.

No, I'm just kidding.

Um, he says, "How much, uh, P or K can I put on in the fall? Is there an upper limit? Uh, let's say you've got a poor soil test of 10 P and 80 K, how heavy can we go without concern?" Christine, I'll maybe go to you on this one.

We do have some slides about potassium and some of these other questions about how much is too much.

Yeah.

So it's, um...

When you, when you think about h-how the, like the ratios of different nutrients that plants put in their tissue, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium is roughly a three-one-three.