Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production

By R. Streatfeild. 2002

560 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Review: Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production By Vaclav Smil Reviewed by Rosemary A. Streatfeild Washington State University, USA Vaclav Smil. Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. 338 pp. ISBN 0-262-19449-X (hardcover). US$34.95. Alkaline paper. Vaclav Smil admits in the postscript of this book that he had planned originally to write a biography of Fritz Haber. He does in fact include a summary of both Haber's and Carl Bosch's lives in the postscript, but the book itself is dedicated to the discovery, marketing, and consequences of the synthesis of ammonia. The book is interdisciplinary; with individual chapters being of interest to specific groups, but with its historical overview will appeal to a wide group of readers. Enriching the Earth follows Smil's previous books that address the world's energy needs, ecology, and food production. The goal of his previous work, Feeding the Earth: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century (2000), is to examine the problem of feeding the ten billion people estimated to inhabit the earth by the mid-21st century. Here, Smil argues against Paul Ehrlich's and Lester Brown's claims for global catastrophe regarding world population and survival rates, surmising that by 2050 the world's human population will cease to grow for reasons other than food production. In Enriching the Earth, Smil examines the effects of higher food production efficiency worldwide. The main focus of the book is on the discovery of ammonia synthesis in 1908 by Fritz Haber, and the commercialization of it by Carl Bosch and BASF (the Haber-Bosch process). With their emphasis on the nitrogen needs of plants, specifically food crops, the first chapters take the reader through an historical survey of what is known about nitrogen. Smil explains the nitrogen cycle and its sources (old and new). He then focuses on Haber's discovery of the synthesis of ammonia, the creation of the ammonia industry, the innovations that developed from the first synthesis, and the production of synthetic fertilizers. The concluding chapters concentrate on how dependent civilization has become on nitrogen and addresses some of the problems that this dependence has created. Smil acknowledges that the abundance of fixed nitrogen has had many undesirable consequences, and outlines them throughout the text. It is illuminating to discover that the level of reactive nitrogen in the global

Subfields: Atmospheric Science

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In Atmospheric Science

1. Paolo D'Odorico
2. Dennis McLaughlin
3. Wolfgang Kinzelbach
4. L. Rosa
5. V. Smil
6. D. Connor
7. H. Aiking
8. C. Kremen

Citations in the corpus

• “More is Different:” Synergistic Effect and Structural Engineering in Double‐Atom Catalysts (2020, background): “NH3 is an important chemical in both industry and agriculture as it serves as a precursor to various foods, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, and detergents.[90] Besides, NH3 is a clean, carbonfree energy carrier whose combustion only produces water and N2, both of which are environmentally friendly.”
• The Realized Yield Effect of Genetically Engineered Crops: U.S. Maize and Soybean (2013, unknown): “Unlike other yield studies we control for the impact of N use N [i],t (kg ha -1 ), a recognized major contributor to yield gains in the 20th century (Smil, 2004).”
• Long-term global availability of food: continued abundance or new scarcity? (2008, methodology): “This was followed by the invention of the electric arc process and then the Haber-Bosch process that made cheap artificial fertilizers available (Smil, 2001).”
• Organic agriculture cannot feed the world (2008, methodology): “Those analyses (Buringh and van Heemst, 1979; Smil, 2001, 2004) are based on the performance of OA systems as practiced in C19 before the widespread use of inorganic fertilizers and when the world population was around 1 billion.”
• Energy at the Crossroads (2003, methodology): “Keep this in mind when you read yet another of the casually tossed-off claims about a continent to be electrified by wind or fueled by crop-derived ethanol by 2020 or 2025.”
• Challenges in reduction of dinitrogen by proton and electron transfer. (2014, background): “synthesis of ammonia is carried out at pressures of 200 – 300 atmospheres to shift the equilibrium towards production of ammonia.(4) Due to these reaction conditions the ammonia synthesis requires an energy input of roughly 485 kJ/mol.”
• Food security and sustainable resource management (2015, background): “Better process understanding and monitoring methods will likely be the keys to development of efficiency improvements that are both effective and economically feasible [Smil, 2001; Erisman et al., 2008; Robertson and Vitousek, 2009].”
• Future protein supply (2011, background): “The tremendous energy input involved in nitrogen fertiliser production causes significant climate change (Smil, 2001; Erisman et al., 2008), and fertilisers leach more easily from the soil than natural nitrogen sources (Crews & Peoples, 2004).”
• The environmental impact of dairy production: 1944 compared with 2007. (2009, background): “The model did not include N2O emissions from inorganic fertilizers because these were not widely used in US agriculture until the late 1940s when ammonia synthesis technologies developed for ammunition production in World War II were adapted for agricultural chemical production (Smil, 2001).”
• Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on A Social-Ecological Analysis of Diversified Farming Systems: Benefits, Costs, Obstacles, and Enabling Policy Frameworks Diversified Farming Systems: An Agroecological, Systems-based Alternative to Modern Industrial Agriculture (2012, background): “…technological innovations had created the “Green Revolution,” an integrated system of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically uniform and high-yielding crop varieties that governments, companies, and foundations vigorously promoted around the world (Evenson and Gollin 2003, Smil 2004).”
• Fossil Energy Use in Conventional and Low-External-Input Cropping Systems (2010, background): “Although ammonia is a dangerous and difficult-to-handle material, much of it is used as the primary substrate to cr ate other forms of fertilizer that allow for more wide use of nitrogen fertilizers (Smil, 2001).”
• The Global Food‐Energy‐Water Nexus (2018, methodology): “…use is required in the production of fertilizers and pesticides; for example, industrial ammonia synthesis using the HaberBosch process for N fertilizer manufacturing uses greater than 1% of energy production worldwide because of its reliance on high temperature and high pressure (Smil, 2004).”