The Invention That Feeds (and Threatens) the World: The Story of Fertiliser

Today we’re talking about something ingrained into modern civilisation that has huge impacts on climate change and human rights, but is something you may never really think about.

Synthetic fertiliser.

Yep, it’s responsible for feeding billions of people but it is also driving climate change, it's poisoning waterways, and it plays a major role in global conflicts. It’s impacts are huge, so I’m going to be giving you a quick run down on everything you need to know, and this will probably also include a little bit of a history lesson.

In this episode I share:

• A quick history of nitrogen fertiliser
• Why we needed new sources of nitrogen
• The human labour and ecological image of the guano trade
• The scientist Fritz Haber and his impact on nitrogen
• The unintended consequence of the haber-bosch method
• How Nazi Germany is connected to companies that make nitrogen
• The biggest consequences of synthetic fertiliser
• How these fertilisers make significant contributions to climate change
• Solutions on how to deal with the nitrogen fertiliser problem
• Natural processes that could fix things
• Scientific breakthroughs in fertiliser

Key Quotes

“In a lot of agricultural regions nitrate levels in drinking water exceed safe levels.”

“About half of the nitrogen in your body came from a fertiliser factory.”

“Today we use about 230 million tonnes of synthetic fertiliser annually.”

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