Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Ammonia plant construction began again in earnest in the run-up to the
Second World War. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) dams provided
ideal sites for additional ammonia plants built to manufacture explosives.
One plant was operating when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor; ten were
operating by the time Berlin fell.
After the war, governments around the world sought and fostered markets
for ammonia from suddenly obsolete munitions factories. Fertilizer use
in the TVA region shot up rapidly thanks to abundant supplies of cheap
nitrates. American fertilizer production exploded in the 1950s when new
natural gas feedstock plants in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma were connected
to pipelines to carry liquid ammonia north to the corn belt. Europe’s
bombed-out plants were rebuilt and converted to fertilizer production.
Expansion of Russian ammonia production was based on central Asian and
Siberian natural gas fields. Global production of ammonia more than doubled
in the 1960s and doubled again in the 1970s. By 1998 the world’s chemical
industry produced more than 150 million metric tons of ammonia a
year; the Haber-Bosch process supplied more than 99 percent of production.
Natural gas remains the principal feedstock for about 80 percent of
global ammonia production.
The agricultural output of industrialized countries roughly doubled in
the second half of the twentieth century. Much of this newfound productivity
came from increasing reliance on manufactured fertilizers. Global
use of nitrogen fertilizers tripled between the Second World War and 1960,
tripled again by 1970, and then doubled once more by 1980. The ready
availability of cheap nitrogen led farmers to abandon traditional crop rotations
and periodic fallowing in favor of continuous cultivation of row
crops. For the period from 1961 to 2000, there is an almost perfect correlation
between global fertilizer use and global grain production.
Soil productivity became divorced from the condition of the land as
industrialized agrochemistry ramped up crop yields. The shift to largescale
monoculture and increasing reliance on fertilizer segregated animal
husbandry from growing crops. Armed with fertilizers, manure was no
longer needed to maintain soil fertility.
Much of the increased demand for nitrogen fertilizer reflects the adoption
of new high-yield strains of wheat and rice developed to feed the
world’s growing population. In his 1970 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance
speech, Norman Borlaug, pioneering developer of the green revolution’s
high-yield rice, credited synthetic fertilizer production for the dramatic
dirty business 197