At no point this was made a witch hunt on vegans.

And are you trying to deny by default what I am stating as "fairy tale" or are you trying to build up on my immediate example.

Yes, corn is a cash crop, along with soy and a couple other cereals. An heavily subsidized cash crop, already identified as a depleter of soils and water sources. Let's cut back on that front and incentivize the planting of rapeseed, as an example. Fulfils more environmentally useful roles than corn and provides a good chunk of useful and very important by-products.

But all of this just to go back to my initial statement: cereals here get a fraction of fertilizers other crops receive and usually through the animals that graze on the left overs and fallow fields. These are practices done by small, family scale farmers.

And yes, the gross majority of nitrates are artificially added, often with no need. And let's also applaud the excelent marketing campaign create by fertilizer manufacturers, that objectively created a notion that it isn't factory made it isn't good.

The muds removed from waste water management plants are phosphorous and nitrogen rich, a fraction of the cost of the synthetic fertilizers yet nobody will use it. Many countries import huge amounts of fertilizers while wasting a readily available resource. That is another bad practice.