Well, it’s all a bit speculative, but I would say first that there is an increasing awareness of the problems we have with nutrients being depleted in some parts of the world and being accumulated in others. There’s a lot of talk about how developing countries are exporting not only their agricultural products but also the nutrients that are in there, and how regions like the eastern part of the U.S. or the western part of Europe are feeding these agricultural products to their animals and then accumulating these nutrients in large quantities in the form of manure on their land. This is causing huge problems. So there is awareness on both sides: in the developing countries, where the exports are taking place, and in the western countries, where the nutrients are polluting streams and lakes. These problems are finally being recognized; more research dollars are being directed into finding solutions for them; more research is being published and that research is having greater impact.

  Were there any changes in policy or direction that might account for the increase?

First of all, we changed the name of the journal six years ago from Fertilizer Research to Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems. It took a little time before that had impact, but eventually people working in the area began to look in our journal for this research on nutrient cycling. Fertilizer research, per se, was a very hot area of research in the time of the green revolution.

  When was Fertilizer Research founded?

In 1980, and I took it over in 1990.

  And what was the thinking behind the name change?

Let me give you the historical context. In the 1990s, almost at the same time that the Iron Curtain fell, there were some real problems in over-capacity in fertilizer use. This was partly because a lot of countries suddenly realized that the subsidies they were providing for fertilizers were not sustainable. They took the subsidies off, and the farmers responded by saying they would use less fertilizer. In other countries, farmers came under pressure to reduce fertilizer use because it was polluting lakes. These two pressures dealt a pretty terrible blow to the fertilizer industry. Then when the Iron Curtain fell, many of these Eastern European collective farms, which had large production facilities, were not capable of paying real prices for fertilizers. And the fertilizer producers started to look for other markets. They became highly competitive with the West. As a result, there was a seven- or eight-year period of enormous consolidation in the fertilizer sector, with bankruptcies and take-overs and so forth. All of a sudden the fertilizer industry was hanging on for dear life and no longer interested in paying for fertilizer research anymore. We could see the resultant downturn in submissions dealing with research, which had been richly sponsored by fertilizer companies in the past. I discussed this with the publishers. I told them that in my opinion fertilizer research was too much of a niche; it was not a viable topic for a journal in the long run and it wouldn’t take a great deal of imagination to broaden the spectrum and say we are concerned with all kinds of nutrient cycles. So we changed the name and then began the process of re-structuring the board by bringing in people from the ecology and agroecology area.

  Did you also change your editorial philosophy?

Yes, we tightened up a little on our policies. One of the most important changes I made was to insist that single experiments would no longer merit publication, unless they were really Nobel Prize material. In other words, a piece of work in an international journal has to be verified, either in time or in space. And we are also insisting that the articles have to have interest beyond isolated locales. There’s an awful lot of research being done that’s interesting for particular farmers, but it’s not terribly innovative. Now we’re tougher on those articles. That doesn’t make us more friends, but it does make for a slightly higher quality journal. None of these measures have an immediate impact. You set up these policies and then you wait and see if they are recognized by authors. And apparently they are.

  How do you see your fields evolving in the next few years?

Well, I think there are a lot of major issues related to sustainability on a worldwide scale that will dominate the field. I’m not even sure that policy makers fully recognize the extent and depth of the problem which we are dealing with in our journal. As more information becomes available and gets published, this will generate new interest and new proposals for research. We’re also dealing with some really serious calamities that lead to environmental legislation. In the eastern part of the United States, for instance, there are more and more laws requiring that farms maintain neutral nutrient budgets. That’s not an easy thing for farmers to do. In Europe, that problem is increasingly dealt with by taxation. If you pollute you pay. Farmers have been polluting on a relatively large scale and have been getting away with it. That attitude is changing. As farmers come under increased pressure to pay the taxes, and as their incomes are subsequently reduced, farming communities are putting pressure on their governments to do research to see how to get out of this situation. As that happens, more funds will become available and more research will be done and published. And I think in the coming 10 or 20 years, this journal will have a major role to play.

  What will that role be?

That role is to allow scientists to communicate about problems that communities have experienced, about innovative research that provides better insight into how these problems come about, and about possible solutions.

  What are the greatest challenges for publishing in this field?

One of the biggest challenges is dealing with the issue of scales. A lot of our science is based on punctual experiments: experiments we do within a field, that we can control, that we can manipulate to see how certain factors will influence other factors. But we’re not very good at taking this kind of information and scaling it up to complete farms, which is more relevant, or to complete watersheds. And nutrient cycles happen to operate within watersheds, so a lot of scientists are struggling with this problem of how to scale up the information. Doing full watershed-type research is very expensive, and very few of those experiments can be done. That’s one of the dilemmas that we’re dealing with at the moment. If people do these full-scale experiments on watersheds—say, 10 square miles, and even that’s a relatively small watershed—instrumenting something like that and following all the fluxes and nutrients through those systems is very, very expensive. Once such research has been done, you want to publish it but you also want to make statistical statements about that research, and that requires that you have two or three of these watersheds, all very similar, so you can have repeat experiments. Only then can you do the statistics. In most cases, that is incredibly expensive. So I made the decision about a year ago that when people said we’ve done these huge experiments covering 100 or 1,000 acres, we would publish them even without repetitions. We still need to have that information and it is so rare and expensive that we have to publish it. This issue of scale is one of great concern in this field and others. We’re just scratching the surface and learning that a lot of work has to be done. That’s what I consider the biggest challenge, or at least the biggest scientific challenge. There are other challenges in the policy arena but we’re not really a policy journal. We draw conclusions with policy implications, but we stop at economic analysis.

Yes. That message is that each and every one of us is a consumer. Each and every one of us is in the loop, in the cycle. The journal hopes to create awareness of the fact that responsible management of these cycles also involves the laymen, who use the food and who discard a significant percentage of the produce purchased. Almost everybody in the United States has a garbage disposal. Imagine how much goes down it every year. Think about the nutrients in there. Think about where they end up. How they accumulate in a city. How many people worry about where these nutrients come from and where they end up? It’s something we should be aware of. We have to rethink the way we operate these nutrient cycles, and every one of us needs to develop the awareness of what role we play in this system as a consumer and what responsibilities go with it.