After more than 70 years in business, Milorganite is finding its product illegal as a lawn fertilizer in some states due to the 2 percent phosphorus in the bag. Other organic fertilizers are fighting the same issue.

The coming year is shaping up as a major battleground and your lawn may be caught in the crosshairs of a fight that stretches from Maine to Washington state.

The issue is phosphorus, denoted by the letter P and the number 15 on the Periodic Table of Elements that hung in your high school science class. It’s also the middle number on your lawn fertilizer bag and, if a growing number of lawmakers continue to get their way, that number will soon read zero (0) if it doesn’t already.

“Legislators always seem to like to take things to logical extremes, which results in illogical legislation,” said Paul Sachs today by phone. He has been selling organic fertilizers for longer than just about anyone else in the nation as owner of North Country Organics in Bradford, Vt.

When Great Lakes states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota first began looking at bans on phosphorus in lawn fertilizers a decade ago, environmentalists like us touted the movement as fundamentally positive. Phosphorus that runs off into fresh water supplies can produce massive algae blooms that suck oxygen out of lakes, rivers or streams and leave them as a eutrified, putrid mess. Homeowners and some lawn care operators, who tend to think more is better when it comes to the application of fertilizers and weed controls, were being fingered as the culprits.

And when professor John Lehman’s research started flowing out of Michigan, showing that the lawn phosphorus ban in that state was in fact reducing phosphorus in the lake, his findings gave massive amounts of fuel to the discussion of phosphorus bans. Now, virtually every state from Maine to Virginia on the Eastern Seaboard has some sort of lawn phosphorus legislation already in place or percolating.

So far, so good, most of us thought . . . except for the one massive consequence that Paul Sachs predicted way back in 2007: many organic fertilizers were going to be legislated out of business. That’s because it’s easy to remove phosphorus from the synthetic chemical fertilizers sold by Scotts Miracle Gro, Bayer and others; meanwhile it’s virtually impossible to remove all the phosphorus from many natural organic fertilizers derived from animals and plants.

As one fertilizer manufacturer said in this SafeLawns interview last year, these phosphorus bans “will effectively kill the organic fertilizer industry.”

ALL PHOSPHORUS IS NOT CREATED EQUALLY

As one of the big three macronutrients — nitrogen and potassium are the others — phosphorus is essential for the general health and vigor of all plants. Among the benefits it provides are stimulated root development, increased stalk and stem strength, overall vigor and increased resistance to plant diseases.

Without phosphorus, in other words, we wouldn’t have lawns as we know them. Any grass that did grow would be wispy and of pale, pinkish green in color. Lawns wouldn’t have the ability to make it through any drought stress of summer or long, harsh winters, either, without phosphorus — so it’s traditionally been added to our fertilizer mixes in somewhere between one-tenth and equal measures to the nitrogen that’s included in the bag.

Proponents of the bans state that most soils in the U.S. already have enough phosphorus in place for established lawns and that the only time you need to apply phosphorus to lawns is during overseeding or repairing bare areas. In fact, in the 11 states where phosphorus is legislated, all of them allow for phosphorus to be put down when overseeding.

The phosphorus cycle explains the various ways plants can uptake phosphorus. (UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA)

Though phosphorus deficiency can be difficult to diagnose on lawns, it shows up more visibly on grass's cousin, the corn plant — which shows vivid red blotches when P is not available.

But can lawns really thrive without any additional phosphorus being added? If clippings are left on the lawn, and the lawn is otherwise treated organically so the soil is alive with microorganisms, the answer is most always yes. Mother Nature has the ability to “mineralize” phosphorus from leaves, clippings and other organic matter and turn it into a form plants can use (see chart, at left).

But Paul Sachs says he has customers call him all the time saying their lawn is turning the wrong color ever since they stopped using phosphorus in their fertilizers. Maybe the mineralization process isn’t functioning well, or maybe the homeowners are bagging their clippings.

“The edges of the blades of grass will turn red in response to a phosphorus deficiency,” he said. “The result of a prolonged period without phosphorus will be weaker stands of grass, which ultimately will lead to more erosion of top soil and even more of a nutrient load in the lakes after all.

“The legislators, in other words, will have worsened the very problem that they’re trying to correct.”

Some of those legislators in favor of no lawn phosphorus frustrate organic lawn fertilizer manufacturers in one other significant way: by not differentiating between organically derived sources such as composts and plant and animal fertilizers, or the chemical products that include synthetic forms of phosphorus. The synthetic phosphorus has been treated to be more water soluble, which automatically makes it more prone to leaching during and after a heavy rain event. Within organic fertilizers, the phosphorus is usually bound tightly to iron or aluminum and won’t release and leach readily.

Attorney Tom Crawford has been fighting this battle on behalf of his company, Milorganite, for more years than he likes to count.

“Legislators just don’t want to hear about these differences (in phosphorus) because it confuses them,” he said. “And then there are the lobbyists for the chemical industry who will testify with a straight face that all phosphorus is created equally. It’s a bold-faced lie, of course, but who’s the legislator going to believe?”

The result has been a mishmash of laws. In Illinois, lawn care professionals can’t apply phosphorus to lawns without a soil test that proves the customer needs it — but the rules don’t stop the customer from applying the phosphorus themselves. Four other states, New York, Maryland, Washington and Vermont, effectively make no distinction between organic and synthetic fertilizers in their bans, according to Crawford. On the other hand, New Jersey, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota all exempt organic fertilizers from their bans — primarily because Crawford personally fought long and hard to make those state officials understand the differences. He has a scientific study from Florida that shows Milorganite — made from composted human waste — is seven times less likely to leach through the soil than synthetic phosphorus. That same study shows that phosphorus bound in compost is also far less prone to leaching than synthetic sources.

That data alone ought to be enough to persuade lawmakers, but as Crawford approaches his retirement next year, he echoes Paul Sachs’ sentiments about illogical legislation.

“After a while, you just shake your head,” he said earlier today. “You just hope that Pennsylvania, which will be next in line with a phosphorus ban, will follow New Jersey and not New York or Maryland.”

The end of Crawford’s career is significant, not just for Milorganite and other biosolids fertilizers companies, but for the organic fertilizer industry as a whole. Few other organic companies can afford to maintain full-time staff attorneys to assure their products’ rightful shelf space. It’s not inconceivable that other states could follow New York’s lead without someone like Crawford to stand up to bad legislation.

THE REALITY ON THE GROUND

Much of the battle is being fought at retail centers where bags full of lawn fertilizer containing phosphorus will either be illegal to sell, or will carry a stern warning label. Since many of the newest laws in New York, New Jersey, Maryland and elsewhere really don’t take full effect until 2012, the entire organic fertilizer industry seems to be holding its collective breath.

“I have no idea how they think they’ll implement this, much less enforce it,” said Sachs, who said his company has seen no drop in sales — yet — related to the phosphorus laws that are hitting like dominos across the Northeast.

A quick Internet search didn’t unearth any prosecuted cases based on the phosphorus laws and reason dictates that the no-phosphorus craze in the U.S. will probably police itself, much like the no pesticide laws have done in Canada. In other words most people will try to follow the law; a certain percentage won’t hear about the law and a few others probably won’t abide it if they do hear.

The bottom line is that reduction of phosphorus in lawn fertilizers is a great intention. Responsible states like New Jersey, that quantify how much can be put down — without eliminating P entirely — have it right. The old days of putting 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer everywhere need to end immediately.

The sad irony of all this, though, is that if everyone simply tended their lawns organically, and let the soil organisms do the work of cycling the natural phosphorus through the system, then green lawns and clear water could easily co-exist. That organic fertilizers are being lumped with their chemical counterparts is an ignorant travesty that’s not supported by sound science.

In the end, our advice is two-fold for both the companies that call us looking for updates and the homeowners who want to know how to be upstanding citizens within the law. First, keep paying attention to these phosphorus bans and make sure organic products like compost, fish meal, chicken manure and alfalfa meal get the exemptions within the laws.

And, second? Overseed your lawn every fall. You should do that anyway . . . and within the letter of law in these phosphorus bans, you’ll be allowed to apply fertilizer containing phosphorus at that time.

Jeremy Brunner and John Harrison, sales and marketing support manager, hold an original bag of Espoma fertilizer.

IF YOU HAVE LIVED anywhere East of the Mississippi in the past half century and you happened to wander into the well-used potting shed of a true, died-in-the-wool gardener, you would almost certainly find a simple, white bag of fertilizer. Maybe it would be half used, slightly soiled. Maybe the top of the bag would be rolled up, as if it were some left over Gold Medal flour or Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake mix.

Since the year of the Crash, 1929, the Espoma company has been producing bagged fertilizers from the same patch of land in Millville, N.J., which happened to be the town where the founder, H.G. Sanders, resided. It was the only fertilizer I ever recall my grandmother using in Bradford, Maine, back in the 1960s and it was the only brand I remember on the shelves at Allen, Sterling & Lothrop garden center in Falmouth, Maine, when I hired myself out as a gardener during high school in the 1970s. I used Espoma’s Holly-Tone for my customers’ shrubs and their bonemeal for the bulbs and other root crops. My gardening mentor, an old sailmaker named Richard Fortune Jr., swore by the bloodmeal for his tomato plants.

As a professional gardener, landscaper and gardening journalist for the past 20-plus years, I’ve visited hundreds, if not thousands of places, but for some reason it took me until Wednesday afternoon to make it to Millville, which is about 45 minutes southeast of Philadelphia and a half-hour west of Atlantic City.

And even if you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can certainly judge Espoma by the remarkably unchanged and simple package on its iconic product of Holly-Tone. The company doesn’t offer any frills or nonsense, but rather efficient repetition. The factory and warehouse has been modernized and mechanized. Many new products have been added and some are even packaged in bright blue and hot pink spray bottles. At the core, though, the company clearly lives by the mantra that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

“We grow slowly but surely,” said Jeremy Brunner, the great-grandson of H.C. Sanders.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the company doesn’t take risks. Two years ago, Espoma quietly — as usual — announced it was going to offer organic products almost exclusively going forward. The company had offered many so-called “bridge” products in the past, which are fertilizers that combine synthetic materials with natural substances. Reading the market trends and sensing consumer demand, Jeremy, his father, Serge, and the marketing team made the switch with a vengeance rarely if ever seen in the eight-decade history.

The result was a complete line of organic fertilizers and potting mixes for everything from orchids and roses to fruit trees. Espoma also added a line of ready-to-use botanical pesticides in those aforementioned colorful containers. Recently, Espoma purchased the lawn care division of the company Organica — which will make the company a significant player in grass maintenance for the first time.

“You have to change with the times, but you don’t have to change your core values,” said Jeremy during our tour of the plant. “These days, so many start-up companies are competing for shelf space in the garden center, the only way to compete is to have a complete line of quality products at a fair price.”

The computerized shipping and packing and robotic packaging stations clearly give Espoma a nice edge. The efficiency allows the company to keep its overhead low and retain an emphasis on the product inside the bag — which now comes almost exclusively from natural sources.

“You have to embrace the best of the new technology to be sustainable in business, while at the same time utilize natural products that keeps the supply chain and planet sustainable, too,” said Jeremy.

Right about then, he had to leave to go coach his 7-year-old son in wrestling, the same sport his father had taught him. Jeremy is about half my size, but I knew I’d never want to tangle with him — on the wrestling mat, or in business.

In a world where gardening brands come and go like alphabet soup, I’m fairly certain this one will still be in the best gardeners’ potting sheds 81 years from now.

“I know organic fertilizers are the way to go, and I’m hearing that a lot of landscape companies are using organic fertilizers because they cost less, but I’m on a Conservation Commission here in Massachusetts and am trying to be very specific about the ratios of phosphorus to nitrogen to whatever else is in lawn fertilzers. What is the best ratio, and mix, and are all organics balanced correctly?”

MY ANSWER: Great question and one that’s impossible to answer without a soil test.

I can tell you that from a pure uptake analysis, grass uses nitrogen, calcium, potassium and phosphorus in that order and that most packaged fertilizers contain too much phosphorus and not enough calcium in their ratios.

Good organic fertilizers generally cost more than chemical fertilizers. If an organic fertilizer is really inexpensive, you need to understand if is a) truly organic, b) if is made from human biosolids or c) some other low grade waste product.

Folks who are really focusing on addressing specific soil needs will often apply bulk nutrients that are often less expensive. If you review these earlier posts, you’ll find that information: www.safelawns.org/blog/index.php/2009/07/natural-fertilizers-part-i/ and www.safelawns.org/blog/index.php/2009/07/natural-fertilizer-part-ii/.

Animal By-Products
Call me old-fashioned, but I still take all the manure I can get from the local farmers in my town. I grew up on a dairy farm and helped my grandfather spread cow manure on everything from the cornfields and hay fields to my grandmother’s vegetable and even flower gardens. I’ll never forget my grandmother’s proper sister, Aunt Evelyn, who marveled about the size and quantity of the blossoms in Gram’s garden. She took off her white gloves, reached down to scoop up some soil, and marveled at the rich material in her fingers. “It’s so nice and dark and healthy looking,” she said.
“It’s cow manure,” said Gram.
Her sister turned white and instantly went inside to wash her hands.
On lawns, animal manures are used mainly as composted amendments. Some other animal by-products can be useful if you can find them at a reasonable price, though it is still a good idea to know the source of any animal byproducts.

Blood Meal
Dried slaughterhouse waste containing about 12 to 15 percent nitrogen and 3 percent phosphorous, blood meal should not be used as a top-dressing because it might burn the lawn. However, you can work it into the soil when establishing a new lawn or use it to help activate a compost pile. Blood meal is expensive.

Bonemeal
Containing approximately 22 percent phosphorus and 22 percent calcium and used during seed, sod, sprig or plug establishment but not as a topdressing, bonemeal can help roots establish. Like blood meal, it is highly expensive.

Feather Meal
A common by-product of the poultry slaughter industry, feather meal shows up fairly often in natural fertilizers because of its nitrogen content of 8 to 15 percent. Feather meal is slow to break down, so the nitrogen is released extremely slowly, which can be good, or bad depending on your soil’s needs.

Fish Products
Growing up on the Maine coast, I vividly recall a foul stench at certain times of year when visiting the shorefront of many communities. Low tide always has a distinctive odor, but this was something more: fish-processing factories. By-products would pile up outside, and depending on which way the wind was blowing, the smell could stick with you all day.
By the early 1990s, manufacturers of compost and fertilizer gobbled up the fish waste as fast as it was produced. Fish emulsion, as it is often called, may contain as much as 10 percent nitrogen and 6 percent phosphorus, with high levels of calcium and micronutrients. In New England alone, at least a dozen companies are now making fish-based fertilizers. Across North America, dozens more are including fish in the fertilizer mix, especially when the goal is a high nitrogen count.
A primary benefit of fish in fertilizer is that it is available to the grass plants more quickly than some other organic fertilizers that first need to be decomposed by microbes in the soil. The fish-based products, in other words, can provide a quick green-up because the nutrients are predissolved in the water and ready for the grass plants immediately.

Compost
Mentioned hundreds of times in this book, compost is the basis of all organic gardening. I submit that the conscious creation of compost and the subsequent addition of compost to the soil is humankind’s primary contribution to the health of the planet as a whole. Plants almost literally can’t get too much.
One quick aside . . . Years ago, when world-famous homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing were farming in Maine, they would faithfully send a sample of their soil to the Cooperative Extension Service at the state university. When the authors of The Good Life got their results back, they were always the same. “Too much organic matter!” they would exclaim together, and then laugh out loud like children.
An optimum goal for lawns, according to numerous agronomists, is 5 percent organic matter mixed in with the particles of clay, silt, and sand in the soil. Since most compost is about 25 to 40 percent organic matter by volume, you need to mix it in liberally to achieve 5 percent organic matter in the overall soil profile. And if you go above 5 percent, it won’t hurt the lawn one bit. Organic matter is constantly cycled by soil microbes, which will quickly devour any extra they get.
The challenge for the homeowner these days is to find good bulk sources of really fertile compost. The least expensive material may contain a high percentage of biosolids (see page xx). Some of the poorer-quality composts may contain high levels of sawdust, which is good for growing trees and shrubs but should not be used in abundance on grass. Compost should also be “finished.” That means it should smell sweet and earthy, not pungent or like ammonia, and it shouldn’t be hot with steam rising from the pile as it pours off the truck.
Some companies do make decent bagged compost, but bagged products are expensive when used on areas as large as a lawn might be. Turn to page xx for a breakdown on how much compost is required for a {1/2}-inch topdressing for spring and fall. For example, you’d need 1{1/2} cubic yards of compost to top-dress a 1,000-square-foot area {1/2} inch deep. That amounts to 40.5 cubic feet, or almost 14 bags each containing 3 cubic feet.
Once you find good compost and can afford it, don’t skimp. Applying compost builds soil structure and adds soil life. In addition to the organic matter, most compost also has some nutrient value, usually about 1 percent each of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Compost does it all in an organic lawn program.
“Think of it this way,” says Todd Harrington, a noted organic lawn care professional from Connecticut. “Ninety-nine percent of the growth in grass happens in the organic matter of your soil. If you don’t have enough organic matter, you have limited your lawn’s potential right from the start.”

My point for this post, though, is that you don’t necessarily HAVE to buy bagged products to apply to your gardens. All sorts of naturally occurring materials can be used as fertilizers. Here are just a few (as culled from my book, The Organic Lawn Care Manual):

Plant By-Products
For years, animal-based products led the way in fertilizers. People never thought twice about manure from cows, chickens, and other farm critters. Then along came fears about mad cow disease, E. coli, and other pathogens associated with animal waste. Suddenly, gardeners were taking a second look at plant-based soil amendments, some of which have wide practical application for lawns.

Alfalfa Meal
Often available in pellets containing approximately 3 percent nitrogen, alfalfa meal is readily available at farm stores as an inexpensive animal feed. It works well as a lawn soil amendment, probably because it’s a grass product.

Corn Gluten
A by-product of the milling of corn syrup products, corn gluten has been marketed as a pre-emergent weed suppressant since 1991. A thin layer of the material applied on lawns and gardens inhibits the germination of seeds (although I think it’s oversold in this regard). High in proteins, corn gluten also contains significant amounts of nitrogen, up to 10 percent. Just don’t apply it at the same time you’re trying to overseed your lawn; the seeds won’t germinate.

Cottonseed Meal
A rich source of nitrogen at 7 percent, cottonseed meal is popular as a fertilizer in some areas of the South where cotton is grown. Most organic certifiers reject cottonseed meal, however, since the majority of cotton in the United States is heavily sprayed with pesticides.

Soybean Meal
A component of many high-end natural fertilizers because of its high nitrogen content, about 7 percent, soybean meal is on the expensive side.

Seaweed Products
The anecdotal evidence has always been there. Gardeners in England and Ireland, where seaweed is plentiful, gather every speck they can find. If you’ve ever seen one of their gardens, you’d have to believe the stuff works. I’ll never forget visiting the organic gardens of Olympic gold medal marathon champion Joan Benoit Samuelson, who lives by the shore in Freeport, Maine. She harvests seaweed by the bushel and lays it in the rows between her plants, and her soil is amazing.
Much of the new generation of bagged fertilizer products has embraced seaweed as one of the key ingredients. Myriad studies have shown kelp contains all 16 elements needed for plant growth as well as a particular hormone known as cytokinin, which is responsible for cell division and cell enlargement. Cytokinin is often lacking in lawns that have suffered root declin and kelp can help restore root vigor. Many organic lawn specialists also point to increased seed germination and seedling vigor when seaweed products are applied.
Dried seaweed contains about 1 percent each of nitrogen and phosphorus and 5 percent potassium.

Wood Ash
Readily available to people who burn wood to heat their homes, wood ash is often used in place of limestone to raise the pH of soil. On average, wood ash contains about 2 percent phosphorus, 6 percent potassium, and 20 percent calcium. Beware, though: Don’t use wood ash from unknown sources, and avoid wood ash if your soil pH level is already adequate or high.

TOMORROW: Free lunches for the lawn