By Guy Smith
It’s a well-worn observation that you don’t appreciate things until you don’t have them. When it comes to global food supplies, that’s most certainly true of fertiliser at the moment.
In times of plentiful affordable food, most consumers or Western governments have little understanding how dependent food supplies are on those little white prills. The media seem equally non-plussed about the key role artificial fertiliser has.
I remember doing a live interview with a Radio Four journalist several years ago. It was at a time when some terrorists were caught with 0.5t of ammonium nitrate in a lock-up garage which they were intent on making a bomb from. The journalist was intrigued that farmers were also quite keen on getting their hands on this potentially explosive stuff.
He was genuinely shocked when I explained I had lorry loads of it in my shed. ‘Why on earth do you need so much of it as a farmer? ’ he boggled at me incredulously. ‘I scatter it on my crops to make them grow,’ I replied. His excited disbelief mounted as he exclaimed, ‘let’s get this right, you store enough bomb-making material in your farmyard which if it got into the wrong hands could be used to blow up swathes of our towns and cities, and the reason you do so is because you put it on your land?’ ‘Yup,’ I retorted, ‘ I couldn’t possibly farm without it’.
I went on to calmly explain ammonium nitrate was only explosive in precise situations not found on farms, and in the hands of growers it had a squeaky clean safety record. But most importantly, that it provided essential nutrients for our crops without which food production would more than halve and people would starve. It was quite a revelation for my well-educated friend, but reminded me that knowledge of food production for most people is about as big a mystery for them as nuclear fission is for me.
The only people outside of the farming community to give fertiliser much attention are the green lobby, which tend to view the stuff as problematic rather than problem solving. Obviously nitrogen fertiliser doesn’t help farming’s carbon footprint as its manufacture is totally dependent on fossil fuels. In terms of its impact on human health, fortunately for us farmers it’s no longer lambasted for causing ‘blue-babies’ as it falsely was in the 1980s. While now, it’s linked with air pollution – although you worry this assertion might, over time, prove about as flimsy as the blue baby statement that was doing the rounds forty years ago.
Alongside the idea that fertiliser causes endless problems is the concept if we properly put our minds to it, we could farm successfully without it. The fact is, history teaches us the opposite. In the 19th century farmers first started transforming their productivity by using things like Guano (South American sea bird poop) and, would you believe, fossilised dinosaur droppings called cropulite.
It gave them fertility Mother Nature couldn’t provide, but it was the invention and development of the Haber Bosch process 100 years ago that made materials like ammonium nitrate widely available thereby enabling crop yields to double.
But as said, when we have plenty available it tends to be wrongly seen as some sort of malevolent substance that farmers would do well to wean themselves off. Hence we’re about to suffer the burden of a £50 tax on AN from the beginning of next year.
What the brain boxes behind this imposition struggle to grasp is, if as a result of this tax farmers use less fertiliser, then we’ll produce less food which in turn sucks in more food imports produced with untaxed fertiliser. Hence any carbon reducing benefit becomes neutralised at the home producers expense.
Hopefully current events in the Middle East might act as a reminder of the importance of artificial fertiliser when it comes to feeding the world population, and that taxing it is a foolhardy step similar to closing the straits of Hormuz.
This article was taken from the latest issue of CPM. Read the article in full here.
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