Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

than half of America’s farmers had been on their land for less than five
years, not long enough to get to know their dirt.
Here was where soil scientists could help. “The soil scientist has the same
relation to the partnership between the man and the soil that ...the
chemist has to the steel or dye manufacturer.” Whitney literally considered
soil a crop factory. “Each soil type is a distinct, organized entity—a factory,
a machine—in which the parts must be kept fairly adjusted to do efficient
work.” 7 However, he was unimpressed with how American farmers ran the
nation’s dirt factories. In Whitney’s view, new technologies and more
intensive agrochemistry would define America’s future. The Bureau of
Soils chief did not realize that it would be a British idea implemented with
German technology.
In 1898 the president of the British Association, Sir William Crookes,
addressed the association’s annual meeting, choosing to focus on what he
called the wheat problem—how to feed the world. Crookes foresaw the
need to radically restructure fertilizer production because society could not
indefinitely mine guano and phosphate deposits. He realized that higher
wheat yields would require greater fertilizer inputs and that nitrogen was
the key limiting nutrient. The obvious long-term solution would be to use
the virtually unlimited supply of nitrogen in the atmosphere. Feeding the
growing world population in the new century would require finding a way
to efficiently transform atmospheric nitrogen into a form plants could use.
Crookes believed that science would figure out how to bypass legumes.
“England and all civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having
enough to eat. ...Our wheat-producing soil is totally unequal to the
strain put upon it. ...It is the chemist who must come to rescue. ...It is
through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into
plenty.” 8 Ironically, solving the nitrogen problem did not eliminate world
hunger. Instead the human population swelled to the point where there are
more hungry people alive today than ever before.
In addition to being natural fertilizers, nitrates are essential for making
explosives. By the early twentieth century, industrial nations were becoming
increasingly dependent on nitrates to feed their people and weapons.
Britain and Germany in particular were aggressively seeking reliable sources
of nitrates. Both countries had little additional cultivatable land and already
imported large amounts of grain, despite relatively high crop yields from
their own fields.
Vulnerable to naval blockades that could disrupt nitrate supplies, Germany
devoted substantial effort toward developing new methods to capture
dirty business 195