Farms that use chemical fertilizers to produce the massive amount of food in developed countries remain one of the main sources of deadly aerosol pollution that cause over three million deaths a year worldwide.

When combined with animal waste fumes and air pollution from motor vehicles, the fine-particulate air pollution released by farms is a major source of disease and death, said a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. 

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The study said the major source of agricultural air pollution is ammonia, a main ingredient in nitrogen-rich fertilizers. These fertilizers release ammonia as a gas from heavily fertilized fields. Ammonia is also released as livestock waste.

Ammonia then combines with pollutants from motor vehicle exhaust to create aerosols, which are minute solid particles no larger than 2.5 micrometers across. Aerosols are quite dangerous because they can penetrate deep into lungs, leading to heart or pulmonary disease. These substances cause at some 3.3 million deaths each year annually, said a 2015 study in the journal Nature.

Nitrogen-rich fertilizer emissions from farms are the main source of fine-particulate air pollution in most of the United States, Europe, Russia and China.

The new study also shows over half the aerosols in much of the eastern and central United States come from farming.

"This is not against fertilizer. There are many places, including Africa, that need more of it," said Susanne Bauer, and lead author of the study and an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.

"We expect population to go up, and to produce more food, we will need more fertilizer."

One of the more controversial findings of the study is the theory a drop in emissions from either agriculture, motor vehicle combustion and agricultural waste will prevent the production of more toxic aerosols.

The study also claims that if combustion emissions fall in coming decades as is expected, fine-particle pollution will also fall even if fertilizer use doubles.

Tagsaerosol pollution, Fertilizers, ammonia, farms, aerosols