The Chemical Fertilizer Controversy
Chemical fertilizer has an almost miraculous impact on crop yields—so miraculous, in fact, that some people mistake it for a divine miracle. Evangelical Protestants in Guatemala have recently been stealing adherents from Catholicism and ancient Mayan paganism. At the same time as these conversions, the widespread adoption of fertilizers (and new seeds) created a remarkable rise in the quantity and quality of their vegetable production. Instead of giving credit to modern fertilizers, Evangelical ministers have been claiming the boost in food production God’s reward for their conversion.
[A Guatemalan citizen states] “God started moving in the whole community, through different miracles that happened—people were getting saved, even I heard miracles of people being raised from the dead, [curing alcoholism], families being restored, you didn’t see all the drunks on the street anymore. It was a complete change.” And according to Evangelical lore, not only did the character of the people…change, the God blessed and healed the land so they could grow more vegetables, and big vegetables, and the records show the vegetables got bigger.
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...a leading Guatemalan economist, published an article about [a Guatemalan region] in which he points out that the mass conversion of Evangelism occurred around the same time as chemical fertilizers, new seeds, and new crops were being introduced to Guatemala.
—Cole, Sean. March 19, 2013. The Story. “Spiritual Warfare: Evangelical Protestants Convert Catholics.” American Public Media.
Chemical fertilizer is something of a miracle, though one borne of human ingenuity. Instead of fertilizing the land through manure, leaving land fallow, or planting land to cover crops, we reach deep into the earth for phosphorus and potassium, and up to the sky for nitrogen. Modern chemical fertilizers are not better than ancient sources, as they only provide some of the nutrients plants need, but they are less expensive.
Without chemical fertilizers we could only feed only 60-70% of the current population, some researchers believe. So reliant are we on nitrogen fertilizer that of all the nitrogen in the muscle and organs of humans, almost half of it was created in a nitrogen fertilizer factory. The Amazon basin was once thought a poor location for any agriculture besides peasant farming, but due to fertilizers they have become an agronomic superpower. Chemical fertilizer is a blessing, and most agricultural scientists agree that they are the most important source of yield increases in the last century. Anyone who uses them will be astounded at their impact on plants, so much so that it is understandable how some Guatemalans can mistake these yield enhancements as a divine gift.
What is happening in Guatemala is simply a continuation of the Green Revolution—a revolution not of politics but of agriculture. The hero of the revolution was Norman Borlang, who some say is a contender for the greatest American of the 20th Century. Developing and spreading new varieties of crops for the developed world in the 1950s and 1960s, and then teaching farmers how to raise them with modern fertilizers, irrigation, and pesticides, Borlang’s movement increased the world production of food calories from 2,063 to 2,798 per person. Huge famines had been predicted in the second half of the nineteenth century, but thanks to Borlaug the only famines were caused by politics (as in China). So influential was he in helping to feed a growing population that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 1970.
If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.
—Borlaug, Norman, responding to those who criticized him for espousing the use of modern agricultural technologies. From:
Easterbrook, Gregg. September 16, 2009. “The Man Who Defused the ‘Population Bomb’.” The Wall Street Journal. A27.
From the perspective of the modern world, the positive developments in Guatemalan agriculture are no surprise. What is surprising is that it took this look for the Green Revolution to reach Guatemala!
Is the miracle of chemical fertilizers too good to be true? Some think so. While they do not deny the ability of chemical fertilizers to improve agricultural productivity in the short-run, they argue the long-run view is not so optimistic. A columnist has mocked opponents of chemical fertilizer by pretending to be one and saying, “If a farmer’s yields are above average, this means he is removing more nutrients from the soil than other farmers in the area, so its best to buy from farmers who have not improved their yields over the past several years.” While said sarcastically, as if the reader will immediately observe it to be an absurd statement, it is also true that some believe the high yields experienced in the past few decades do come at the expense of lower yields in the future.
Critics of chemical fertilizer also argue that the use of such fertilizers leads to pollution and encourages the growth of large corporations, and for some, large corporations are themselves a problem. These are the controversies we will now explore.
Fertilizer in Ancient Athens
Plants need a variety of nutrients, with the most important nutrients being nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Whenever we harvest a crop we are removing some of these nutrients from the field, and if they are not replaced the field will become infertile. In our age we replace the N with that we extract from the atmosphere using advanced chemistry and factories, and we replace the P and K with that we mine from the earth.
Farmers in the past did not have these technologies, so they had to make sure the N, P, and K they removed from the field was soon returned to the soil. The N, P, and K were acquired by closing the loop of nutrients between plants and humans. All of the nutrients harvested from the crops were consumed by humans or livestock to be deposited and stored as human sewage, manure, compost, and the like. To some extent they mimicked our methods of acquiring fertilizer. By leaving land fallow bacteria would grab nitrogen from the air and store it in the soil, and some nutrients were mined. However, withouth closing the loop of nutrients between fields and humans the soil would not remain fertile. See the description of agriculture in ancient Athens below.
