Synthetic Fertilizer and Food Security*
The prediction of worldwide famine over a century ago and how we prevented it.
*Reposted for new subscribers.
In the autumn of 1898, in Bristol, England, the new president of the British Academy of Sciences took the podium, and instead of a flowery speech about the accomplishments of the Academy for the year, he began a speech in which he predicted that if nothing was done, millions of people around the world would be starving, even in the most developed nations, by 1930. The very best British scientist sat in silence as Sir William Crookes explained how the world was in peril. As scientific advancements in sanitation, medicine, and industrialization of commerce made it possible for more people to survive and thrive, the population of the world was growing. And according to Crookes’ calculations, the food supply would be maxed out and mass starvation would prevail.
You see, food production through the 19th century was dependent upon manure of all types, including human, to maintain adequate yields to feed the population. The only reason the world had not run out of food before 1900 was because as soon as cropland became unproductive from depletion of nutrients, the farmer would move over and plow out some more virgin soil that was rich in nutrients. By the time of Crookes’ speech, a majority of the virgin soil in the world has been depleted of it’s natural fertility and there wasn’t enough manure to maintain crop yields. Plowing up grasslands and deforestation was happening at an alarming rate.
Crookes called on the scientific community of the world to find a way to harvest the vast reservoir of nitrogen that is contained in our atmosphere but is unavailable to plants and animals. Inaccessible because it is inert. The trivalent bond of N2, inert nitrogen, that makes up 78 percent of the air we breathe, is the strongest chemical bond. In 1900 there was no way to break the trivalent bond and change the atmospheric nitrogen into a form of nitrogen plants can use (and as a result humans can consume as well). Plant-ready nitrogen is called fixed nitrogen. Legumes fix nitrogen naturally, and lightning has the power to break apart N2 and form fixed nitrogen, but for the most part, all forms of nitrogen found in nature: manure, legumes, and lightning could barely sustain a world population of around 4 billion people.
That was the challenge. This was serious business. If the scientists could not solve the puzzle of breaking the N2 bond, the world was only a few short decades from devastation.
CHEMICAL FERTILIZER
You may have noticed I used the word synthetic fertilizer in the title of this post. I laugh when people rant against chemical fertilizers because I know that ALL fertilizer is chemicals. Seriously, I’m not playing games. Ammonium and nitrate, which are plant ready forms of nitrogen are found in manure, in organic mater in the soil and in manufactured fertilizer. If you take a molecule of nitrate from cow manure and a molecule of nitrate from manufactured nitrate fertilizer, both molecules are chemically identical. The most advanced scientist in the universe could not tell you which molecule came from the dung and which came from the atmosphere (which is the source of all manufactured nitrogen fertilizer). I like to playfully call it ATMOSPHERIC NITROGEN because the atmosphere is its source. (Even my green friends like to eat food grown with ATMOSPHERIC NITROGEN!)
HOW THE WORLD WAS SAVED FROM STARVATION
I will let author Thomas Hagar(link) explain. He has written the fascinating true history of the Habor-Bosch system of fixing nitrogen in his book: Alchemy of Air (link).
Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were two chemists who invented a way to turn air into bread . . . Their work stands, I believe, as the most important discovery ever made. See if you can think of another that ranks with it in terms of life and death importance for the largest number of people. Put simply, their discovery is keeping alive nearly half the people on earth.
Most people do not know the names of either the men or their invention. But we should thank them every time we take a bite of food. Their work lives today in the form of giant factories, usually located in remote areas, that drink rivers of water, inhale oceans of air, and burn about 2 percent of all the earth’s energy. If all the machines these men invented were shut down today, more than two billion people would starve to death.
Thank goodness for Haber-Bosch! Childhood mortality rate is the lowest ever. In the developed West we have had the safest, most abundant food supply in human history. Lately we’ve been complaining about grocery store shelves being 20% empty. Well cry me a river! Just ask our Dust Bowl Era ancestors if they would trade places with us!
“ORGANIC” CHEMICAL FERTILIZER
As I mentioned above “organic” fertilizer has the same chemical composition as manufactured fertilizer. There are a few drawbacks to organic fertilizer and some positives as well.
DRAWBACKS
Less nutrient density. Very low nutrients per pound of material. It takes tons of animal manure per acre to equal 300 lbs of commercial fertilizer, which means the gathering, spreading and incorporating of the organic stuff is extra cumbersome and adds cost. It requires more trips to the field from the source which means burning more fossil fuels.
Disease outbreaks. Some of the most memorable E-coli outbreaks resulting in spinach and lettuce recalls have resulted from cross contamination of food handling equipment by vegetables fertilized with E-Coli contaminated animal feces. Remember Chipotle’s?
Lower crop yield per acre, typically. That is why “organic” fruits and vegetables cost more. Production is less efficient. Which leads to #4.
Lower crop yields means you need more land on which to grow the crops to feed the world, and there is not enough land to feed the world at the yield levels achieved by organic farming. Never mind that there isn’t anywhere near the amount of organic fertilizer available to cover those acres.
Please don’t get me wrong. If you know the drawbacks to organic foods and still want them I will stand with you to have the right to have them. But if extremists are successful in ridding the world of manufactured fertilizer, we are in a world of hurt.
ADVANTAGES OF ORGANIC FERTILIZER.
If it’s nearby and cheap, it is a good use of natural waste products. (Just don’t use it on spinach or lettuce, please).
If land isn’t scarce in your area, you may be able to make more per acre marketing your organic crops at a local market. Everyone should have the freedom to pursue their livelihood.
CONCLUSION
Atmospheric nitrogen made into little white pellets to fertilize the world’s crops is the greatest godsend our planet has ever received (Besides Easter). We should rejoice in the abundance of food that we have. Enough to feed every citizen of the world if we all work together.