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Page added on December 15, 2016
Will Humans Run Out of Fertilizer?
Most people don’t think about fertilizer, but few innovations are as central to modern life. In the 20th century, manmade fertilizer helped avert human catastrophe on a massive scale. With population growth outstripping the food supply, experts predicted millions of people would starve. Fertilizer helped farmers grow more food on less land and feed a growing population, proving the experts wrong.
“Two out of every five people on Earth today owe their lives to the higher crop outputs that fertilizer has made possible,” Gates writes in his paean to the stuff. That is equivalent to the populations of China, India, and the United States, combined. According to The Fertilizer Institute, an industry trade association, “Without fertilizer, modern farming would cease to exist.”
Some claim fertilizer is a dangerous “fixation” that wrecks the environment. And yet, global population is expected to near 10 billion people by 2050—that’s 2 billion more mouths to feed—so humans will likely need a lot more. Can mankind innovate its way out of a potential disaster?
* * *
People have used human and animal waste to help crops grow for thousands of years. Manure is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, critical nutrients for strong crops. Yet this “natural” fertilizer has inherent limitations, and eventually a problem arose. The population started growing faster than the food supply needed to support it. That meant one of two things had to happen: Either fewer people or more food. But more food requires more fertilizer, and on this front nature let humanity down. In 1798, Thomas Malthus summarized the dilemma: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the Earth to produce subsistence for man.”
In some sense, Malthus was right. The Earth, by itself, does not produce enough useable resources to support rapid population growth. It provides plenty of raw materials, but raw materials are different than useable resources. Oil, for instance, was an essentially useless raw material until people figured out how to convert it into useable energy—kerosene for lamps, then gasoline for vehicles.
But Malthus failed to appreciate the people’s ability to make the Earth more productive than nature alone would allow. Enter Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber. In 1908, these two German scientists discovered how to mass-produce nitrogen fertilizer using natural gas, replacing animal manure as the primary method of delivering nutrients to crops. This discovery, known as the Haber-Bosch process, applied human ingenuity to convert natural gas, a raw material, into a useable resource, nitrogen fertilizer.
Still, manmade fertilizer didn’t “take off” until after World War II, according to the Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav Smil. Global fertilizer production rose 220 percent between 1920 and 1940 but exploded by 3,000 percent from 1940 to today. In the mid-20th century, many experts maintained the Malthusian view that population growth would outpace food production and millions of people would starve to death. In his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, for example, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich lamented: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over.”
Another American biologist, Norman Borlaug, had other ideas. Farmers needed to dramatically increase crop yields to meet rising food demand. But fertilizer was a double-edged sword: It helped grow crops, but sometimes the crops would grow too large and tip over, ruining the harvest. In response, Borlaug used genetic engineering to create a shorter, more compact wheat plant that wouldn’t fall.
“When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new ‘semidwarf’ plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing,” explained The New York Times in its 2009 obituary of Borlaug. “This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.”
For his work combining manmade fertilizer with genetically engineered crops, Borlaug won a Nobel Peace Prize and became known as “the man who saved a billion lives.”
* * *
Despite its benefits, fertilizer is mired in controversy. Critics point to soil erosion, nitrogen runoff, and carbon-dioxide emissions. Grist, for instance, published a series of reports titled “The N2 Dilemma: Is America Fertilizing Disaster?” Ammonium nitrate, a key component of fertilizer, is also used to make explosives. It is no small irony that Fritz Haber, one of the scientists who won a Nobel for developing manmade fertilizer, is also known as “the father of chemical warfare.”
There is also a more fundamental criticism of fertilizer. It is rooted in the belief that people are not part of nature, but a blight on it. The more people on the Earth, the more the Earth suffers.
While critics like Ehrlich see projected population growth as another impending catastrophe, it doesn’t have to be. The history of fertilizer shows what the economist Julian Simon, an arch rival of Ehrlich, has described as the “master resource” (energy) and the “ultimate resource” (people) working in tandem to improve the human condition—and beat the odds.
“Energy is the master resource, because energy enables us to convert one material into another,” Simon writes. “The ultimate resource is people—skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”
Haber and Bosch used natural gas to produce manmade fertilizer. Borlaug figured out how to combine manmade fertilizer with genetically modified crops to massively increase agricultural productivity. Today, scientists are developing “precision agriculture” techniques to further increase crop yields while using fertilizer more efficiently.
Pessimists like Malthus and Ehrlich consider people a self-destructive drain on nature, but as Lusk, the Oklahoma State University agricultural economist sees it, “they underestimated the ability of humans to adapt and innovate and make productive use of the resources we have available.”
14 Comments on "Will Humans Run Out of Fertilizer?"
Midnight Oil on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 6:12 am
Will humans run out of land to sit their fat as@holes on? Throw this article in the heap tat comes out of them!
dave thompson on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 6:17 am
We eat fossil fuels.
makati1 on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 6:33 am
There is enough propaganda bullshit flowing in America to fertilize the whole world forever. LOL
As for the rest, we flush hundreds of thousands of tons of fertilizer into our rivers in America everyday. Human fertilizer is what kept China going for centuries. Urine is nitrogen. The rest is useful in the form of fiber and the other chemicals the soil needs to replenish itself. IF it was used wisely.
Too bad they are now polluted with drugs, all the unnatural chemicals in our food, heavy metals from the water, poisons from pesticides and herbicides, etc. We have really fouled our nest.
brough on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 6:36 am
The above article reads like a year 11 history assignment. How Haber and Bosch showed humans how to ‘fix’ nitrogen from the atmosphere and there by simultaneously having the ability to grow the population to the point where all other resources are exhausted and enough explosives for mutually assured destruction.
What I’m really concerned about is rapid global depletion of potassium and phosphorus. Try fixing them from the atmosphere.
Davy on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 7:17 am
We better get back to a nutrient cycle in a locally based way at least those areas that hope to have a future. Industrial agriculture will wither away along with our economy once decline sets in with a vengeance. Global industrial agriculture has no future at the scale it is at. This means our global population will fall with the decline in fertilizer and the global economy. There are no alternatives to what we are doing today at the scale we are doing it. This is a simple relationship so many deny today. This denial is based on techno optimism and the decoupling of modern man from the land. We are going to need a hybrid of industrial agriculture and permaculture during our transition to collapse. This transition will be a bridge but insignificant in the longer term. In the longer term we cannot maintain so many people without the industrial monocultures of globalism. Globalism will not last and no alternative can produce as much economic activity as globalism.
Everyone should be growing something but the problem is current economics don’t support it. Most people do not have the time and our civilization with its specialization does not allow it. That said many have free time and they could be devoting that time to growing food instead of play time. Do we need to be playing on the beach when we could go hungry? We have a serious issue with priorities today. Locally based food is a partial answer so if we are not doing it then we are not embracing one of our few options. Even with locally based foods there are no answers for a situation of too many people. A die off is baked into the cake. I guess you could call that an answer but with a whole different dark direction of disposing of people.
onlooker on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 8:54 am
Human fertilizer is what kept China going for centuries—Food that is another thing. Can anyone say Soylent Green
makati1 on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 9:09 am
Human fertilizer was used to grow food, not be food.
onlooker on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 9:12 am
haha, too bad we would have so much food yummy
Jef on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 10:45 am
Haber Bosch synthesized fuel to keep the war machine going. Only after the war did they focus on other uses.
Also cramming grains into the hands of billions of starving people is not “nourishing the population”. Nothing was averted, just slowed down a bit transferred to poor health and bad physical development allowing them to live just long enough to continue to procreate.
Also Borlaug didn’t genetically modify he bred plants.
JuanP on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 12:26 pm
“the man who saved a billion lives.” Or the man who helped destroy the biosphere much faster, if you ask me. But, of course, nobody cares what I think because I am an antisocial, maladapted, realist and my realistic perspective is extremely unpopular in today’s denialist societies. Let’s just continue pretending that having 7.5 billion people on this planet and adding 80 million people per year is great. Always look on the bright side of life!
Davy on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 12:48 pm
True Juan, the green revolution was a handmaiden of overshoot that has lead us to the vicinity of a bottleneck. Until we are able to use wisdom to guide capability there is no hope for humans. This often means not doing something of great potential and instead doing less. That does not fit with the modern social narrative of progress at all cost.
Bob Inget on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 1:19 pm
What Brough said.
Several ‘natural’ ferts ‘peaked’ years ago.
Mines that once were rich in Phosphorus and Pot
are no longer ‘profitable at current prices’.
Because oil took a two year downer, North American AG went along for that sled ride.
Oil exporters, it seems, had money for armaments but not consumer goods. Now that even funds for cluster bombs ran out the door it’s time to throw a bone to hungry populations, hike oil prices.
As stock watcher I didn’t figure out why ferts
were tied so closely to oil pricing. With NG at
historic lows due to over supply, why were ammonium purveyors losing money ? Now you know.
Anonymous on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 1:28 pm
A stupid article with plenty of assertions that are just plain, well, wrong. typical of amerikant ‘writers’. No wonder y’all score so low when it comes to educational scores and rankings.
I wasn’t aware there we had a shit shortage. Human that is. I thought we had a problem finding out how to treat and dispose of it all. But, according to this crap article, we do. We have a shit shortage and cant find enough to fertilize our fields with. Better to just flush it all into the nearest convenient waterway instead.
Peakshit on Thu, 15th Dec 2016 9:39 pm
Will you run out of shit? Yeah you’re flushing your future down the tubes.