Cows and other ruminants fill a niche in the ecosystem once filled by buffalo and other ruminants. Those critters which fill those niches do what the other critters did: eat green things, drink water, make more critters, and produce waste from their alimentary canals and renal systems.
What I want to know is how the airborne crystallized pee was tracked, versus waterborne, re-dissolved crystallized pee in runoff.
Furthermore, I want to know how this pee was attributed to any specific genus or species of organism versus any other species or genus of organism that pees.
Just as cows fill an niche in the ecosystem once filled by bison, ammonia fills a niche in the ecosystem once filled by cows. If the cows grazed on the fields where the hay was growing, their own urine would feed the hay. But they usually don't, and so applying manufactured ammonia to the field is a replacement for the grazing cows.
There wasn’t any nitrate fertilizer back then.
This ranks right up there in my list of top “this is total Bull****” opinions on an “environmental” issue.
If the symptoms actually exist, I wonder if anyone has plotted the rise of Chinese industrialization with this symptom?
A few years back it was frantically clutched at that atmospheric pollutants were killing off all the high altitude amphibians in the Sierra, until a non idiot pointed out that the declines just happened to coincide with fish and game seeding all the fishless alpine lakes with trout...
Using your comments, I think the issue would be the fertilizers used for high grass yield. Bison ate the grass au natural as it were. And yes, for thousands of years bison, birds and other numerous fauna peed and pooped. This article sounds like pseudo science garbage.