Few people spare a thought for nitrogen. But with every bite we take—of an apple, a chicken leg, a leaf of spinach—we are consuming nitrogen. Plants, including food crops, can’t thrive without a ready supply of available nitrogen in the soil.
The amount of food a farmer could grow was once limited by his or her ability to supplement soil nitrogen, either by planting cover crops, applying manure, or moving on to a new, more fertile field. Then, about 100 years ago, a technical innovation enabled us to produce a cheap synthetic form of nitrogen, and voila! Agriculture’s nitrogen limitation problem was solved. The age of industrial nitrogen fertilizers had begun.
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