THE FOURTH AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION
Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man. George Washington, 1st US President.
In broad-brush terms, historians divide agricultural progress into three stages. The First Agricultural Revolution defines the shift from hunting-gathering to farming 7-10,000 years ago. The Second Agricultural Revolution refers to the introduction of mineral fertilisers and the initial industrialisation of farming in the 19th century.
The Third Agricultural Revolution began in the middle of the 20th century and involved improved crop yields through breeding and agricultural inputs such as chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We are now in the foothills of the Fourth Agricultural Revolution – the decarbonisation of our food supply chain.
In his book, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil explains that “there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen.”
Even though the earth’s atmosphere is about 80 per cent nitrogen, nitrogen atoms must be split and fixed to hydrogen atoms before being used for fertiliser. A chemist named Fritz Haber worked out how to do that in 1909. Before he made that discovery, all the usable nitrogen on earth had to be fixed by soil bacteria or electrical lightning, which breaks down nitrogen bonds in the atmosphere.
Mr Smil argues that the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch commercialised Haber’s idea) was the most important invention of the 20th century. He estimates that 40 per cent of the people on the planet today would not be alive if Haber hadn’t invented it. Without synthetic fertiliser, billions of people would never have been born.
THE HABER-BOSCH PROCESS WORKS BY COMBINING NITROGEN AND HYDROGEN GASES UNDER IMMENSE HEAT AND PRESSURE...
Source: IFA
www.fertilizer.com 6 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | Q1 Edition 2022 Source: IFA
www.fertilizer.com Chart 2: Historic Cereal Yields and World Population
The Haber-Bosch process works by combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure, with the power supplied by electricity from oil, coal or, most commonly today, natural gas. Once humankind had acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the sun’s energy to a new dependency on fossil fuel.
Through yield and acreage increases, the growth in agricultural production continues to match population growth. As Vaclav Smil knew, this correlation contains a causality: the increase in farm yields has permitted the growth in world population. Without these yield increases, billions of people would never have been born.
Chart 1: World Fertiliser Production
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