Johnboy, I'm going to punch you and run so to speak as I'm off on hols today.
I'm too excited to sleep -going to Hong Kong!- so finally have time to give a considered reply to your post.
You say:
Nitrogen is Nitrogen pure and simple but all of a sudden in America it appears that there it is difference and it is this difference that makes the report so unbelievable. They used FYM where it is almost impossible to measure the amount of nitrogen so again the trial is inaccurate.
But the study wasn't comparing the overall amounts of nitrogen, it was comparing different farming practices.
While I agree the journalist isn't being very clear in her statements, as a grower myself what I took from the article was that scientists speculated that the sudden availability of nitrogen in artificial fertiliser as compared to the slow release from manure may have been responsible for the results. In the study itself the organic fields were fertilised with cow manure and green manure. Now you know as well as I that too much fertiliser is bad for crops, so there may well be something in the results of the study.
Compare for example eating a packet of sweets and eating a whole melon. The calorific value may be the same and the amount of sugar (though in different forms) may be the same. But eating the sweets will give you a sudden release of sugar into your bloodstream which your body will then have to deal with with a sudden flush of insulin. Do it enough times and hello diabetes. If you eat lots of melon though, the cellulose in the melon will prevent the same sugar rush and it will deliver other nutrients too. So clearly eating the melon is better for you.
I see artificial fertiliser as similar to giving your crops a big packet of sweets for dinner. Yes, they'll get necessary nutrient from them, but they'll get only that nutrient and nothing else and they'll get it all in one go.
When you consider how much we now know about the huge variety of trace elements we as humans need to be fully healthy, as well as protein, starch and fat, I cannot but believe that the same applies to plants and that it isn't enough to give them their NPK and expect them to get on with it. Yes, I know you can get supplements if the plants show another identified deficiency but this is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. I believe we need to keep the soil healthy by keeping it as close to its natural state as possible. Until we have uncovered all the secrets of plant nutrition it is best to rely on nature to do its work by mimicking its systems as best we can.
If you read the study you can see that in fact it is very even-handed, rigorous and thorough. I agree the article has sensationalised the results somewhat but the results do stand.
I don't understand your insistence that you will only believe studies done by British-based scientists. I hope this is only referring to the relevance of our island's climate on food eaten here and not the reliability of Americans in conducting scientific studies. I would find that rather
