The Last Bite

From 1909, Haber-Bosch would be used to feed people, pushing the population to twice what was previously thought possible, and destroying millions of lives through the explosives it could produce. But it's true claim to fame was proven in this quote, “Approximately half of the protein in today’s humans originated with nitrogen fixed through the Haber-Bosch Process.” In other words, around half of the fibers in your body are only there because of Haber-Bosch.

Plants growing, Vermont Public, unknown.

Of course, there are side effects. Chemical fertilizer is rich with nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the three main elements of life. With these three aspects anything grows faster, crops and weeds alike.

Farmers always want their crops to grow well, so they can sell them, then buy seeds to grow more crops. Farmers over apply fertilizer and it runs off, runoff enters ponds, algae in the ponds grow marvelously fast. There’s the chain reaction. With more algae, there’s less oxygen in the pond, and nothing else in the body of water can live well. Many, many, farmers over fertilize, and so the world has immense amounts of fertilizer in lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, and even oceans. This leads to huge amounts of algae in the water. Useless, oxygen-taking algae that reduces the fish population, and therefore the world's food sources.