More than a century ago two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, perfected a technique for taking nitrogen from air and combining it with hydrogen to make ammonia, now widely used to make nitrogen fertilizers. What came to be known as the Haber-Bosch process unleashed a revolution in crop yields which were no longer limited by natural inputs of nitrogen.
So important is this process to crop yields that it is estimated that without it half the people alive today would starve. If the worldwide application of nitrogen fertilizers had no adverse consequences, there would be no problem continuing business-as-usual. But the consequences have become worrisome:
- Increasing algal blooms fed by nitrogen runoff in waters around the world are killing aquatic life and endangering humans who wade or swim into such waters. This is the cause of so-called “red tides” and also of the famous “dead zones” at the end of some of the world’s largest rivers.
- Nitrogen fertilizers stimulate microbes in the soil thereby increasing their conversion of nitrogen to nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. Those fertilizers are responsible for a dramatic rise in nitrous oxide in the atmosphere. This gas is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide is the third most important greenhouse gas behind carbon dioxide and methane.
- The imbalances and blooms caused by nitrogen fertilizers are threatening many species and thus the planet’s biodiversity.
But, there is no movement comparable to the climate change movement to champion solutions. One reason is that few people know and understand the significance of the imbalances being fostered by our widespread use of nitrogen fertilizers. A second reason is that the consequences of weening ourselves off such fertilizers would be nothing short of catastrophic. There is simply no readily deployable substitute for nitrogen to grow crops in quantities sufficient to feed the current world population.
We have therefore unwittingly created a monkey trap for global human society. A monkey trap consists of a coconut with hole just large enough for a monkey to get his hand in. The coconut is fastened securely to a stake. Food is put into the coconut. When a monkey tries to withdraw his hand now full of food from the coconut, he finds that the opening is too small. So, the monkey is stuck. His instinct tells him to hang on to the food and keep trying. But doing so endangers him every second he stays put.
[slide-anything id=’3472166′]
The widespread availability of nitrogen fertilizers is like the monkey trap. We need those fertilizers desperately to feed the growing human (and animal) population. Evidence tells us that with every day we continue, the dangers from their use grow. But we cannot stop ourselves.
This is just part of a more general conundrum for the human community which knows that abandoning the highly productive industrial way of life we have built would entail immense suffering for some and maybe most people alive on the planet today. However, waiting for the collapse that is inevitable along our current unsustainable trajectory will entail even greater suffering.
Right now we are simply whistling past the graveyard hoping that something will come along and prevent the worst. So far, nothing has; nor is there anything on the horizon. Regarding agriculture, there are small experiments in regenerative farming around the world. But, there is no widespread move to bring human society back into balance with the soil it depends on for its existence.
Doing that would require a reorientation of our thinking away from regarding the soil as just another industrial platform for obtaining our needs, but rather a system of which we are an integral part and with which we must harmonize.
Photo: Fertilizer plant near El Centro, California (1972). By Charles O’Rear (EPA). Via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FERTILIZER_PLANT_NEAR_EL_CENTRO_-_NARA_-_548851.jpg
Comments
Welcome to the new Resillience commenting system!
We have moved from the former Disqus commenting system to a new system as of September 10, 2026.
We made this change because of privacy concerns regarding Disqus. It's also part of a set of changes to bring more services to the Resilience community under a single login: commenting, (coming September 2026), and online courses (coming 2027). Unfortunately, your old Disqus comments may not reliably link to your account in this new system. Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns.
It is axiomatic that market gardeners use fewer chemical fertilizers and have a lower energy footprint in their fertilizer. So if you want to buy into a lower nitrogen footprint, you can start by buying your fruit, vegetables, beans, and grain from your local farmers market. If the meat vendors at the market are growing their forage on-farm, they will have a lower nitrogen footprint too. There is some question about those who use no-till methods that depend on buying huge amounts of compost that is produced on an industrial scale, as well as those no-till farmers who have simply replaced the tillage with herbicides. The bottom line is to be an informed consumer, find out how your food is grown, and make choices. The best alternative is to grow your own. You don’t have to have a large patch to use cover crops and green manures to improve your fertility. And quality organic fertilizer is cheap for what you actually get.
Market gardeners will never supplant the grain produced by modern ag that feeds so much of the world. Witness the panic caused by the up to now obstruction by Russia to export Ukrainian wheat and corn. Small scale thinking will likely ultimately kill off half the world’s population. Are you prepared to see that happen?
The US average wheat yield is around 50 bushels/acre (2020). In Ukraine it is around 56 (37,950 hg/ha in 2020). The difference is likely due to a smaller area measured and the chernozem soiis of the Ukraine. I was reading recently that the average wheat yield during the 1st Ur dynasty of 2500 BCE was around 10 bushels/acre and that was enough for an ancient civilization. By the 3rd dynasty, the average yield had dropped to 3.5 bu/acre and that was not enough to sustain the Sumerian civilization. Now obviously, there was a smaller elite of 5-10% so most people were farmers or tradespeople. Back when I was a market gardener I had no problem getting the equivalent of 20 bushels per acre using a walk-behind tiller and threshing with an electric chipper/shredder. Now I am using a flail for threshing and I don’t have access to high quality seed like Red Fife or Glenn, for example. With the crap fodder wheat I grow – mostly as a surival crop – I am still at the equivalent of 4 bushels an acre. If I was better with a scythe and a flail I could probably double that to 8, which was the medieval average in France.
So that is a short precis of the kinds of experiments I have been doing. If you want to grow 50 bushels of wheat per acre, you have to have big rigs and lots of diesel to power them. But then your EROI will always be in the range of 10 kilocalories of fossil fuels to 1 kilocalorie of food produced and you are just eating oil. If you want to have a sustainable EROI based on tiny amounts of diesel/gasoline and mostly human sweat, you can produce an EROI of 1 kilocalorie energy to produce 3 kilocalories of food. In addition, the pollution is reduced dramatically. So small-scale wheat growing is certainly doable and I proved it for several years before I retired.
The real problem is overpopulation and most people belonging to the elite classes that don’t do manual labor for a living. (The old conundrum of office workers vs. factory and ag workers.) Small-scale sustainable farming/gardening cannot feed 8 billion. But it could feed 1.5 billion. When die-off hits, it won’t kill off half of the world’s population as you suggest. I will likely kill off 80-90%. And it won’t matter if farmers are still using John Deere monster combines when it happens. It will happen regardless.
The tired old argument that “Organics and small-scale agriculture cannot feed the world,” is a red herring. Industrial agriculture does not feed the world now, with about 1 billion people starving. Also, about 50% of the world gets its food from small-scale farmers. It is just in the US that small-scale farmers are looked at with disdain and disrespect.
What an interesting statement. And the obvious response to its individual value might be, everyone make a list of all the OTHER things that weening ourselves off of would be nothing short of catastrophic, and then we can prioritize them. However, for reasons beyond me, no one has really undertaken THAT particular task. Is it because the answer is crazy scary? Or is it because the root of all of it is something we can’t change in ourselves, so why think crazy scary thoughts in the first place? Is it because we change them from day to day or year to year, and NONE of them are really significant because few to no people are willing to do without any one on that list, let alone any of the top couple?
Humans got to where we are by piling clever solution on top of clever solution, lest we forget this began to be noticed more than half a century ago, and our cleverness back then wasn’t going to get us out of the 1980’s with a Great Dieoff. And then, as such things, go, more Great Cleverness went farther than Great Dieoff expectations. So, we reset the clock (famously Colin Campbells first published Global Peak Oil was in 1990, right when Jimmy’s claim that oil would run out by the end of the 1980’s was debunked by, you guessed it, more oil) and rinse-recycle-repeat ad infinitum. Right up until the wheel stops spinning, and we prove that sentience is of no more value long term to an apex predator like us than being a large dino-reptile living renewably for tens of millions of years….until some random rock happens along.
I think you are right that very few people are interested in preparing for any “weening off” of anything important, which means that business-as-usual will continue until it can’t, at which point civilization goes cold turkey on several important inputs and then … collapse.
Given that situation, there are still things that individuals, families and small groups can do to prepare for the time when the civilization hourglass runs out of sand. It is possible to do things that improve one’s chances of surviving the transition to post-civilization. It’s time to get busy doing them. The dinosaurs didn’t know the rock was coming. We do.
Collapse is certainly a possibility, but probably not a requirement, and is dependent upon the definition of “collapse”. Some folks claim “collapse” was happening in 2008 when the DJIA crashed. But it wasn’t, it was just a market collapse. And so it goes, with folks like me figuring that if we don’t get a decent gross population reduction out of any given “collapse”, it really isn’t. How are humans even supposed to NOTICE if “collapse” is just a series of Sri Lanka’s across the Third World? But something that knocks off 15% of the global population? Now THAT Joe will be noticed! Most will have been involved in it, won’t want to be involved in it again if they survive, and then, and only then, might enough people do that “mmmmmm…do I want to do this again, or maybe, just maybe…might I wish to change my behavior?”. And sure the dino’s didn’t see it coming….but we do….and guess what? We don’t appear to be doing any more about then they did. So again….the value of that sentience thing?
AS a farmer the problem is that we are depleting our soils of the microbes quickly but those of us who have actively gone regenerative there is a lot of hope and I especially see great progress in our own farm. The transition to cover crops and good rotations with pasture shows that we can improve our soils but it does take time. Its been 10 years for us and finally there are good results. The inclusion of animals such as cows or draft horses with pastures really helps get our soil microbes working. I have crops only on a small part of the farm which soon goes back to pastures for a couple of years.I am also learning more about diverse crops including many species and then separating them when cleaning. There is a great future to regenerative framing, it just takes a long time for the soil to adapt and just as long for the farmer to learn how to do it successfully.
I have found out that if we eat nutrient dense food we don’t need as much. This has got to help many people who suffer from a weight problem because they feel hungry all the time.
Sri Lanka’s catastrophic current state is directly caused by the sudden and complete banning of fertiliser. The perfect illustration of this article.
Agreed – which doesn’t mean that organics is wrong, just that the now-here overpopulation is dependent on fossil fertiliser. Which will be in increasing contention, on the way to becoming unavailable.
There is perhaps no way out of this predicament, although there are always best-in-the-circumstances ways to deal with things.
Not all ag microbes keep N+P in the soil longer as advertised. The problems are nutrient runoff at non-point sources getting into waterways creating harmful algae blooms in 50 states and globally. A health risk to humans and animals.
The MAJOR problem is the suicidal “religious” (political powers and capitalist socioeconoimc system’s) drive to “be fruitful and multiply” coupled with “fossil” substances being exploited by barely literate monkeys – homo sapiens sapiens(sic) – to enable overpopulation of the planet well beyond its carrying capacity in just over 100 short years.
The Catch-22 is that the only REAL solution is to decrease the population.
We can
1) Follow one traditional path, war – commit suicide by nuclear holocaust
2) Wait until Mom Nature’s backlash removes our infection more slowly but just as violently
3) We can grow up and mature and find a way to SHARE the excess equally and fairly while we can still create it, promote universal access to Birth Control for all and empower women to use it – to relatively peacefully decrease the population of humans to a sustainable level on a finite Planet.
Of course, the gentle path will require us to replace capitalism and religion as drivers of social interactions.
Earth Overshoot Day – July 28th 2022
On July 29 we went into ecological deficit. Humans have used the entire annual budget of resources that can replenished by nature. We entered overshoot ~ 40 years ago.
How can this problem be fixed as humanity swells by billions more this century?!
Consider the possibility that the problem cannot be fixed. It has to be endured. This is not just fatalism. It is a new paradigm and a new path.
In his book “A Short History of Progress,” the historian Ronald Wright provides an extended analysis of what he calls a “progress trap.” The situation with nitrogen fertilizer that Kurt describes is an excellent example of such. A progress trap is an innovation that provides access to a greater amount of resources or energy, but ultimately the innovation generates serious problems that can only be “solved” by another innovation, which will in turn become another progress trap. At the present moment, it appears that fossil fuel use may be the ultimate progress trap.
and Tom Murphy talked about the Energy Trap in one of his Do the Math columns, where as we convert to renewables, the temptation is constant for decision-makers to abandon the plan that involves belt tightening so we can devote fossil fuels to building out the renewable infrastructure. The energy used for that buildout comes at the expense of Business As Usual, up until the conversion is 100% complete, and he assumed there wouldn’t be an endless abundance of fossil fuels to do both.
There isn’t a major movement toward regenerative agriculture, but there IS a minor movement, which may well gain steam (or is that the wrong metaphor?) as the fossil fuel supply tightens. I expect the current major price hike in fertilizer is spurring farmers to experiment with using less, and with cover crops etc.