American farmers dealt new blow as Trump's Iran war escalates

[NNadir]

49. "Organic" farming played a huge role in causing the US Civil War.

The abandonment of "organic farming" allowed the First World War to go on as long as it did.

In the first case, cotton is a crop that rapidly depletes soil of fixed nitrogen. In 1860 Lincoln was decidedly not an abolitionist. He merely claimed the right to limit slavery to where it existed. Chemical understanding was nearly nonexistent in the 19th century, and while people understood the value of things like manure, they certainly did not understand why manure worked nor did they have enough to around. Therefore, the survival of the cotton industry needed to expand to new lands to survive, and with it, human slavery.

As chemical understanding came to be developed by the early 20th century and people understood that fixed nitrogen, salt peter, was in fact fixed nitrogen, mines provided the initial means of preventing soil depletion, most in modern day Chile.

Salt peter, potassium nitrate, is also a component of gunpowder. One couldn't have a long war without it. This is why a British blockade of Germany was a serious threat to the German war industry.

In the early 20th century, the German chemist Fritz Haber (who was Jewish), working with the chemical engineer, Karl Bosch, developed the first industrial scalable process for nitrogen fixation, the Haber Bosch process, which allowed Germany to make both fertilizer and gunpowder. The Haber Bosch process which relies for now on dangerous fossil fuels, originally and still in some places, coal, to make hydrogen, is behind the ability to feed seven or eight billion people on this planet. Without the process more than half the world's population would be consigned to starvation.

This is a fact.

A more serious issue is connected with phosphorus which is still obtained by mining. It is an sword of Damocles hanging over the future of humanity, seldom discussed but very real.

The Haber Bosch process played a huge role in the US raprochment between "red" China and the United States. The Chinese communist government hated the US as much as we hated them. However, the Chinese knew that they would have great difficulty avoiding more famine without American Haber Bosch technology and so they agreed to meet with Nixon. This is a subtext that is not widely known.

This issue, the importance of nitrogen fixation and its roles in world history is covered in Vaclav Smil's book Enriching the Earth which is now more than two decades old is still very much worth a read.

One of the first catalysts that Haber found to be workable, was interestingly, uranium, but he didn't pursue it because he thought it too rare. (We now understand it is common.) Modern Haber Bosch catalysts are either based on iron or molybdenum. The latter metal is utilized in natural biological nitrogen fixation as a metalloprotein, which, while it works, works too slowly to support the world food supply via crop rotation.

I hope this answers your question.