this is the second respose

 I found an interesting article that deals with a soil breakthrough helping growers. First, the issue here is that growers and farmers might have been over fertilizing their crops for almost their entire life. But Richard Haney, A USDA Agricultural Research Service soil scientist in Temple, Texas, stands by with a microwave plasma to maybe stop this over fertilizing. This microwave plasma measures minerals at the molecular level, which have helped growers assess their soil organic matter and plant-available soil nutrients and also gives producers insight into the effectiveness of their efforts to improve soil health. Like i said earlier that the growers might be over fertilizing their crops, i really just meant that their are! Especially with nitrogen. Haney has devised the first method to measure organic nitrogen and phosphate in soil that will be available for a plant to utilize. Prior test besides, Haney's method, have missed plant-available organic phosphate and nitrogen, leading producers to overestimate the amount of supplemental fertilizer necessary to raise a crop.

“It turns out all of these years we’ve been measuring one form of nitrogen, which is inorganic, and we have been missing about half of what’s there,” said Haney, who has now tested more than 220,000 U.S. soil samples.

          Common test for inorganic soil carbon involves combusting a small sample of soil and measuring the nitrous oxide made in the process. But Haney's devised includes placing soil in water, separating the organic compounds from soil in a centrifuge and combusting only living material, thus, measuring only the organic nitrogen available to soil-borne microbes for feeding plants.

          Now Haney has been conducting test since 2007 and his method recently has just been emerging over the USDA, thanks to a NRCS soil health specialist, Ray Archuleta. Whom Haney meet back in 2012. Now Archuleta’s growers have sent him soil samples to test from throughout the country , which Haney tested 5,800 samples in 2015. Slowly but surely Haney has been winning over the farmers and growers as well as potential people that would want to invest their time and make the microwave plasma an essential high-cost production system.

          My thoughts on this innovative breakthrough are that we are always going to farm and grow crops in this world. Being an engineer, i feel free to find new ways of doing things more efficiently and precisely. And in this case, the efficient part is that crops will be fertilized at the right levels, thus making way to possibly making more money for having better crops. Also i would consider that the cost to create such machine will be worth a profit in the future and at what risks can this new product have if any. In the article there was never any negative feed back, which leads me to wonder if it is too good to be true. Like i said, Haney has just now emerged with his methods of testing soils and being able to determine the right amount of fertilizer to be used. I'm going to keep a look out for his name in the soil industry and see if his devised invetion was a hit or miss.

THIS ONE FOR  Israel Rodriguez