> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted
You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.
A quick Googling of the literature (more general terms seems to be bioinoculant and biofertilizer) suggests exactly that. There are industrial products out there for large-scale inoculation, but manufacture, packaging, shipping, and application of bioinoculants can require rather sophisticated carriers, whether in solid, liquid, or polymer form; or engineering more easily accommodated bacteria or fungus. It seems it's still very early days for industrial-scale products, notwithstanding that the research and perhaps even some products go back decades.
You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.