Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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fiscated the remaining lands that could be mined. Shortly thereafter deep
mining operations began throughout the island. After that a million tons
of phosphate left for commonwealth farms each year. Although Nauru
gained independence in 1968, the phosphate deposits are mostly gone and
the government is virtually bankrupt. Once a lush paradise, this island
nation—the world’s smallest republic—has been completely strip-mined.
The few remaining islanders live on the coast surrounding the barren
moonscape of the island’s mined-out interior.
Ocean Island is no better off. Phosphate deposits were exhausted by
1980, leaving the inhabitants to eke out a living from land made uninhabitable
to bolster the fertility of foreign soils. The island now specializes as
a haven for tax shelters.
Large phosphate deposits were discovered in South Carolina on the eve
of the Civil War. Within two decades South Carolina produced more than
a third of a million tons of phosphate a year. Southern farmers began combining
German potash with phosphoric acid and ammonia to create nitrogen,
phosphorous, and potassium based fertilizer to revive cotton belt soils.
The emancipation of slaves spurred the rapid growth in fertilizer’s use
because plantation owners could not otherwise afford to cultivate their
worn-out land with hired labor. Neither could they afford to have large
tracts of taxable land lie idle. So most plantation owners rented out land to
freed slaves or poor farmers for a share of the crop or a fixed rent. The
South’s new tenant farmers faced constant pressure to wrest as much as
they could from their fields.
Merchants saw tenant farmers trying to work old fields as a captive market
for new commercial fertilizers. They were too poor to own livestock,
yet their fields would not produce substantial yields without manure.
When merchants began lending small farmers the supplies needed to carry
them from planting to harvest, experience quickly showed that paying off
high-interest, short-term loans required liberal use of commercial fertilizers.
Conveniently, bulk fertilizer could be purchased from the merchants
who provided the loans in the first place.
Just before the Civil War, Mississippi’s new state geologist Eugene Hilgard
spent five years touring the state to inventory its natural resources. His
1860 Report on the Geology and Agriculture of the State of Mississippi gave
birth to modern soil science by proposing that soil was not just leftover dirt
made of crumbled rocks but something shaped by its origin, history, and
relationship to its environment.
dirty business