Yet the tractor also created a problem . While it lowered farm labor cost, all those millions of people that relocated to the cities needed to eat. That meant that farms needed to be even more productive. That’s where nitrogen fertilizer first came into play. And that’s where our money making opportunity starts… A Solution for How to Feed the World Nitrogen is one of the most abundant gasses in nature. Plants and animals rely on this element to live. In the early 20th century, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch discovered a way to easily convert nitrogen in the atmosphere to ammonia – one of the key ingredients in fertilizer and industrial feedstocks. They weren’t the first to harness nitrogen from the atmosphere (called “nitrogen fixation”). But they were able to do it in a quick, efficient manner. The Haber-Bosch process – combined with the use of pesticides – quadrupled the productivity of farm land. We used nitrogen-based fertilizer on our family farm to increase yields of corn, sorghum, tobacco, and hay. Today, the Haber-Bosch process produces around 450 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer annually. The invention of the Haber-Bosch process to make cheap nitrogen- based fertilizer won its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. I’m not sure that their intent was to feed the world. You see, another use for nitrogen-based fertilizer is to make explosives... And in 1918, the world was at war.
After World War II, the use of nitrogen fertilizer, using the Haber- Bosch process, began to skyrocket…
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