All agriculture requires adequate fertilisation, whether natural or artificial. The two key components of fertilizers that crops require are phosphorus and fixed nitrogen. Most of us are aware of how critical the Haber-Bosch process is to modern agriculture. What is less known is what was used to fertilise crops before the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process in the 19th century, a tale that illustrates the escalating ratchet of human progress and how progress increases the stakes of the game and the consequences of collapse.
Night-Soil as Fertilizer
Before modern sanitation, cities such as London were filthy places overflowing with human excrement and waste. However, human excreta was also a valuable commodity as a fertilizer that farmers were willing to pay for. The men who removed this waste from the cities were known as ‘night-soil men’ (the excreta itself being the night soil as it was removed at night).
By taking the waste back to the countryside to fertilise the soil, the nitrogen and phosphorus that came to the cities in the form of food went back to the countryside in a cycle that maintained soil fertility. However, the rapid growth of cities and the improvement in sanitation via flush toilets and sewers broke this cycle. As Ruth DeFries explains1,
what was once a cycle from soil to crops to human waste and back to the soil became a unidirectional flow from soil to rivers and seas. Again, the solution to one problem created yet another. The city became cleaner, but the soils lost their replenishing supply of nutrient-rich night-soil.
Bird Droppings as Fertilizer
The solution to this problem was found in the most unusual of places - bird droppings (known as guano) off the western coast of South America. Although the Incan farmers were long aware of the value of guano as a fertiliser, the German geographer Alexander Von Humboldt introduced guano as a fertilizer to Europe. What followed has been named by some as the ‘guano age’, the details of which are scarcely believable. Ruth DeFries again provides the details:
By 1840, Humboldt’s discovery had sparked a booming trade in guano. Workers in Peru mined beds of the bird excrement, loading it onto ships for transport to Europe and North America. Peru prospered from the trade, as did the middlemen. The British firm Antony Gibbs & Sons amassed a fortune from a virtual monopoly, paying $15 a ton and selling it in Britain and the United States for $50.
Competition for guano triggered everything from imperialist land grabs to wars.
The US government passed the Guano Island Act in 1856 to bolster American’s claim on the lucrative resource, stating that “whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other government . . . such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” Under these auspices, American entrepreneurs scurried to claim islands and atolls scattered the world over. Among the scores of islands claimed under the act were Jarvis and Baker islands, two remote, uninhabited coral outcrops in the South Pacific; Navassa Island, a tiny protrusion of barren limestone in the Caribbean; and Christmas Island off the coast of Australia.
In 1864, war broke out between Spain and Peru. Spain, demanding repayment of debts arising from Peru’s war of independence, took control of the guano-rich Chincha Islands. They occupied the islands from 1864 to 1866. The islands were so crucial that a war that started first with Peru came to include Chile, and then Bolivia and Ecuador.
When the guano ran out, saltpetre replaced it with equally violent consequences.
Chile declared war on Peru and Bolivia in an attempt to gain control of saltpeter-rich desert provinces. The War of the Pacific, also known as the Nitrate Wars, left Chile the victor in 1883. Bolivia lost its access to the coast, leaving the country desperately landlocked. Peru’s economy, without access to saltpeter and with little guano left to mine, collapsed. The country was bankrupt.
From Guano to Haber-Bosch and Phosphate Rocks
Just when the guano and saltpetre began to run out, fossil fuels enabled us to convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process with the required phosphorus coming from phosphate rock.
For the last 150 years, agriculture has been an escalating ratchet - what we call progress also brings with it an increase in the stakes of the game and the severity of the collapse if we fail to innovate our way out of the next bottleneck. This is not a pessimistic thought - the entire history of humanity is a series of such ratchets. But we should acknowledge that this path carries with it an ever-increasing severity of a catastrophic collapse if we fail to surmount the next challenge.
DeFries, Ruth. The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.