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Christmas Specials | The wibbly-wobbly circle of life

Deadly, dirty, indispensable: the nitrogen industry has changed the
world

It lays waste to ecosystems, allows wars to kill millions and has
kept billions from starvation

[20221224_X]
Dec 20th 2022
Share

It used to be a marvel; it remains, in its way, a subject of awe.
Between the River Tees and the town of Billingham in the northeast of
England there is a sprawling chemical works just over 100 years old.
In the 1920s, as part of the newly formed Imperial Chemical
Industries (ici), it was feted as a miracle of modernity; to a
visiting Aldous Huxley it was "one of those ordered universes that
exist...as pure logic in the midst of the larger world of planless
incoherence", a forerunner of the sort of future he would explore and
deplore in "Brave New World". In the 1940s its strategic importance
made it a target for the German Luftwaffe; by the 1960s it employed
20,000 people, the largest plant of its sort in the world.

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Today cf Industries, the American firm which now owns the site,
employs just 200 people on Teesside. Behind its perimeter fences much
of the once thronged area borders on the derelict. But the plant can
still fulfil the function for which it was first built. Billingham
fixes nitrogen.

"Fixing" nitrogen means turning the element's chemically inert
gaseous form, which makes up 78% of the atmosphere, into a more
reactive compound. Only after this is done can the
nitrogen-containing compounds fundamental to agriculture and industry
be created. Plants such as Billingham perform this crucial step by
distilling nitrogen from liquefied air and reacting it with hydrogen
generated from methane and steam to make ammonia, a gas in which
every nitrogen atom is bound to three hydrogen atoms.

The mixture of temperature, pressure and catalysts needed in order to
make this happen was first demonstrated by Fritz Haber, a German
chemist, in 1909; the means of providing them on an industrial scale
were developed by Carl Bosch of basf, a German chemicals firm. In
1913, at a plant in Oppau, outside Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, the
Haber-Bosch process got to work. At the end of the first world war
the treaty of Versailles required the details of the process to be
revealed to the victors, and chemical engineers descended on Oppau to
understand how it might best be copied at places like Billingham.
Huxley found the result awe inspiring:

    The scene of [the final transformation] is a huge
    building...church-like by reason of the silence that reigns there,
    its solitude and the long line of vast steel cylinders receding,
    like the columns of a Norman cathedral, into a distant twilight.
    It is within these cylinders that the mystery is finally
    consummated. Brought into contact with a catalyst, the hot
    compressed gases suffer a last sea change. That which, a quarter
    of a mile away, was air, emerges from the cylinders as ammonia.

Ammonia has many uses; it can be a cleanser for water supplies or a
way of scrubbing toxic gases from exhausts. It is a chemical
feedstock that can be turned into nitric acid, necessary for the
synthesis of explosives such as trinitrotoluene (tnt), or cyanide,
which the chemical industry uses to make polymers such as nylon. And
it can be used to make fertilisers.

The haber-bosch process, fundamental to feeding 8bn people, is one of
the preconditions of modernity

Poke around on a British farm and you will probably see blue bags of
the Nitram-brand ammonium-nitrate fertiliser pellets made in
Billingham. If it were possible to poke around inside the crops
growing in those farms' fields, you would find that much of the
nitrogen they contain had come from such pellets. And if you are a
Briton who does not source your food almost entirely from organic
farms (which eschew chemical fertilisers) something similar is true
for you, just as it is for most people in rich and middle-income
countries. The human body typically contains a few kilograms of
nitrogen, an amount which, lumped together, would weigh about as much
as your arm from finger tip to a bit above the elbow. In most people,
in most parts of the world, a good kilo of that nitrogen has passed
through the reaction vessels of the Haber-Bosch process. A
factory-made forearm's worth of flesh.

Without the Haber-Bosch process it is estimated that 30-50% of the
world's harvest would be lost; it is fundamental to feeding the
world's 8bn people. Like electricity and the internal combustion
engine, it is one of the preconditions of modernity.

And just as the fossil-fuel use that has provided most of the world's
electricity and mobility has rearranged the planet's carbon cycle, so
the drive to fertilise has upended its nitrogen cycle. About 90% of
the nitrogen fixed into fertiliser at a plant like Billingham fails
to get into humans. Much of it builds up in the environment rather as
carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere. As with the carbon
dioxide, this causes problems. It kills people, reduces biodiversity
and affects the climate. Its effects are less disturbing than those
of carbon dioxide; but given the scale of carbon dioxide's threat to
the climate, that is no great comfort.

Nitrogen fixation is, at the moment, closely tied to that fossil-fuel
use; perhaps 2% of fossil-fuel use is in nitrogen fixation plants
like Bellingham. And like fossil-fuel use, it ties together disparate
parts of the world. That Russia is rich in natural gas, the source of
almost all the hydrogen used to make ammonia, as well as phosphorus
and potash, other crucial plant nutrients, makes it a fertiliser
superpower, the only country in the top-five exporters of all three
products, which are often sold mixed together in specific
proportions. Its invasion of Ukraine resulted in these fertilisers no
longer flowing west to Europe, where farmers use them more
efficiently than almost anywhere else.

That drove up fertiliser prices, and when fertilisers have risen in
price faster than their crops, farmers often choose to use less of
the stuff, reducing input costs to protect their margins, or grow
other crops. High fertiliser prices might be expected to stimulate
production at places like Billingham. But again, margins matter;
Billingham's natural gas now costs more too. And so prices stay high,
encouraging farmers to use less and, in poorer parts of the world,
increasing the number that use none at all. Politics, pipelines and
factories halfway around the world affect the harvest as surely as
the sun and rain.

Natural cycles that have been at work for billions of years are now
shackled to human politics and economics in ways that span the
planet, shape its ecosystems and reach into human nerves and hearts.
The notion of an "Anthropocene" world, in which human needs,
relationships and politics have reshaped the most fundamental
planetary processes, can seem very abstract. Seen through the lens of
nitrogen it is as immediate as the meal on your plate.



In 1843, the year The Economist was founded, a rich English farmer,
Sir John Lawes, started a long-running experiment in a field called
Broadbalk. Both beginnings were driven by concerns about wheat. The
Economist wanted tariffs on wheat imports which benefited English
landowners--the Corn Laws--lifted so that free trade could bring down
the price. Lawes wanted those landowners and their tenants to be more
productive, and thus more competitive, and to make money by helping
them become so.

To that end he embarked on a carefully controlled study of the
benefits of fertilisers both natural and artificial. On his
Rothamsted estate, about 50km (30 miles) north of London, he divided
a played-out wheat field into a set of parallel strips, each to be
fertilised differently. The study of soils and yields thus begun
continues today, the longest-running experiment in the world.

In the sunny late afternoon of an otherwise rainy October day,
Broadbalk's 4.5 hectares (11 acres) of just-ploughed and -seeded soil
stretch black and rich up a gentle slope, a ditch at the bottom, a
stand of trees at the top. Ian Shield, who manages the agronomy
experiments at what is now Rothamsted Research, apologises for the
fact that the low sun, the recent ploughing and the residual
rainwater make the long-built-up differences between the soils in the
various strips hard to discern by eye.

Come spring, though, the difference will be manifest. The strips will
flourish according to how they have been fertilised. And those which
will do best will be the ones that have received heroic amounts of
manure and those which received a lot of Nitram.

When Lawes began his experiment at Broadbalk he was particularly
interested in the benefits of a fertiliser produced from bones and
sulphuric acid known to work in rich soils, and which Lawes was
producing for sale at a works in London. The Rothamsted work showed
that, on its own, the concentrated phosphorus in this product did
little. When applied along with "ammoniacal salts", however, it
achieved a lot, increasing the yield by a third--the same as the
improvement provided by rich farmyard manure. As Lawes wrote a couple
of years later, in an article enthusiastically reported on by this
newspaper:

    The absolute necessity of supplying nitrogen to enable the soil
    to produce more wheat than it could do in a natural state, is so
    apparent throughout this series of experiments, that it is
    difficult to entertain the slightest doubt upon the subject.

Lawes had shown what has come to be known as Liebig's law of the
minimum. In his work on agriculture Justus von Liebig, then the
world's greatest chemist, argued that plant growth was limited by
whichever of their necessary nutrients was in shortest supply;
providing more of any other nutrient would be of no avail. In
Broadbalk, nitrogen was the limiting nutrient.

[20221224_XMD016]

The same, it has since been discovered, is true not just in British
farms; it is true in most farms across the world, and in most of the
world's land-based ecosystems. This is, at first blush, surprising.
Billions of years before Haber and Bosch got to work, some types of
bacteria had evolved the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.
The supply of other vital nutrients, such as phosphate and potassium,
depends mostly on the abundance of minerals which contain them in the
rock from which the soil is made; in some places they will be scarce.
Nitrogen is available wherever the bacteria capable of fixing it from
the atmosphere can live--which means pretty much anywhere.

There are, however, some basic biochemical constraints; life needs a
great deal of nitrogen; and fixing that nitrogen requires a lot of
energy.

Of the four types of large molecules on which life depends,
two--proteins, which catalyse chemical reactions, and nucleic acids,
which embody genetic information--are composed of lots of
nitrogen-bearing subunits. This means that living things require more
atoms of nitrogen then they do of any other element save carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen.

One of the reasons nitrogen is such a good building block for big
molecules is that nitrogen atoms are capable of forming three
chemical bonds to their neighbours. Each nitrogen atom in the
backbone of a protein is connected to two carbon atoms and a
hydrogen; in nucleic acids they may make one bond to one carbon atom
and two bonds to another.

[20221224_X]

This versatility, though, is inseparable from the chemical quirk that
makes nitrogen hard to fix. Nitrogen atoms can use their capacity for
making three chemical bonds to tie themselves to each other very
tightly. Molecules of N[2], the gaseous form of the element which
makes up most of the atmosphere, are pairs of atoms which share such
a "triple bond"--the threefold strength of which explains why prying
them apart in a Haber-Bosch reactor requires high pressure and a lot
of heat.

Bacteria are far better chemists than Haber, Bosch or any of their
human successors. The catalyst they use to fix nitrogen, a protein
called nitrogenase, has been fashioned by evolution to do so without
high temperatures and pressures, twisting and coaxing the molecules
apart rather than breaking them with brute force. That said, it is
complex to make, fussy about its working conditions (it cannot abide
the presence of oxygen) and an energy hog; keeping it going requires
a lot of metabolic juice. The ability to fix nitrogen thus extracts a
high price from the bacteria that do it.

Adding nitrogen to an ecosystem is hard work; losing it from one is
distressingly easy. Fires remove nitrogen more thoroughly than they
do other nutrients (it is because potassium is left behind when the
fire is done that it is called, in agricultural applications,
potash). Water leaches soluble forms of nitrogen out of soils when
other elements prove more recalcitrant. And there are also bacteria
which, instead of making fixed nitrogen, feed on it, eventually
turning it back into N[2] or N[2]O--nitrous oxide, also known as
laughing gas--and returning it to the atmosphere.

Birds can be very good at depositing nutrients from the oceans thick
and white upon the land

Evolution has encouraged other organisms to support the nitrogenase
using ones in their endeavours. Many plants exude sugars to feed the
nitrogen-fixing bugs in the soil; some, the legumes, build up
symbiotic nodules--rhizomes--in which the bacteria can fix their little
socks off. Some 19th-century crop rotations included legumes as a way
of restoring nitrogen, and Lawes recommended them. He also saw that
wheat's need for nitrogenous manure meant those rotations should
contain fodder crops so the farm's livestock could produce an
adequate amount of it. The ammoniacal salts bought from chemists to
use at Broadbalk were all very well for experiments, but there was
nothing like enough of them for the industry as a whole.

Change, though, was afoot. As anyone who has stood too long beneath
sea gulls can attest, birds can be very good at depositing nutrients
from the oceans thick and white upon the land. The best such deposits
in the world, at that time, were those on islands off the west coast
of South America. The nutrient-rich upwelling waters of the Humboldt
current make the seas there peculiarly fecund, and persistent high
pressure makes the climate particularly dry, allowing droppings rich
in concentrated nitrogen, phosphate and potassium to build up for
centuries.

In 1840 the Peruvian Republic granted Don Francisco Quiroz, president
of the Lima chamber of commerce, a monopoly on the exploitation of
the guano on the shittiest of its islands, the Chinchas. He was
backed by British and French investors who knew that men of science,
such as the current's namesake, Alexander von Humboldt, spoke highly
of the stuff.

In March 1841 a ship called the Bonanza unloaded the first reeking
cargo of guano in Liverpool; all told, 8,000 tonnes were imported
that year. By the end of the decade the tonnage was 70,000. In 1847
Lawes calculated that if farmers were to provide the wheat fields of
Norfolk with as much nitrogen as was made available by crop rotation
using guano instead, they would have to apply 76,000 tonnes. Within
ten years Britain imported three times that amount every year. Guano
had gone global.

This was the pivotal moment in what Francis Thompson, a British
historian, called the "second agricultural revolution"--the shift, as
he put it, from farming as a sort of extraction to farming as a sort
of manufacture. Before, farms had been akin to living mines, their
production limited but self-renewing. After, they became more like
factories, their owners and managers concerned with inputs as well as
outputs. The essentially local and closed nature of the farming
economy was opened up--as it had to be, given the fact that fewer and
fewer people were living on the land.

Britain, in the fore of this second revolution, was initially the
main market for Peru's "white gold"; but America and continental
Europe followed. In 1856 America's Guano Islands Act made it a
national policy that claims which citizens staked to uninhabited
guano-coated islands would be protected by the navy. The objections
of those who saw such seizure as a route towards the imperialism
which the republic so detested in others were waved aside.

When, by the 1860s, many of the best guano deposits had been
depleted, the trinity of nutrients it had provided in a user-friendly
bundle began to be procured singly. Phosphate came from bones and
fossilised dung. Potash was produced in the backwoods of Canada;
after the discovery of huge deposits of potassium-bearing mineral
salts in Prussia it was mined, too.

As for nitrogen, most came from mineral deposits in the Atacama
Desert, not that far from the guano islands off Peru. In 1879
competition for control of the nitrate deposits saw a war break out
between Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Chile won, and for the rest of the
century it completely dominated trade in fixed nitrogen.

But its supplies were not unlimited. In 1898 (the year America's
guano-begotten non-imperialist expansion across the Pacific saw it
annex Hawaii and the Philippines) Sir William Crookes, a chemist,
alerted the annual meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science to a coming nitrogen crisis. Crookes noted
that the number of people around the world gaining sustenance from
bread, and thus wheat, had been 371m in 1871. Less than three decades
later the number was 146m larger. And it was continuing to grow
exponentially; in another 30 years there would be 230m more.

Existing means could not meet such demand. Crookes believed the world
to offer no great new tracts of land suitable for wheat farming. And
at the then current extraction rate of 1m tonnes a year, Chile would
run out of nitrate within a generation or so.

Replacing wheat was not an option. "The accumulated experience of
civilised mankind", Crookes wrote, had "set wheat apart as the fit
and proper food for the development of muscle and brains." If the
world was forced to depend on lesser grains like rice and maize,
"races to whom wheaten bread was not the staff of life" would squeeze
the "Great Caucasian race...out of existence".

That made the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen "one of the great
discoveries awaiting the ingenuity of chemists...vital to the progress
of civilised humanity". On the basis of the latest figures from
Rothamsted he calculated that eventually as much as 12m tonnes a year
would be needed.

There was, as Crookes mentioned in an aside, another imperative, too.
The chemists of the second half of the 19th century had not
restricted themselves to plant nutrition and dyes. They came up with
a range of compounds in which, if given the right push by a
detonator, nitrogen atoms would quit their places tied to oxygen
atoms in order to form triple bonds with each other, thus creating a
hot, rapidly expanding explosion of N[2], carbon dioxide and steam.
Nitroglycerine, stabilised in the form of dynamite, was
revolutionising civil engineering. In guns, the development of
"smokeless powders" that produced much less soot than old-fashioned
gunpowder made it possible for the gases produced when one bullet was
fired to drive a mechanism which would chamber the next. Such
automatic weaponry chewed through flesh, and used up ammunition, as
never before.

The increasing military need for fixed nitrogen driven by these
developments was particularly worrying to Germany. Imperial ambition
was near its peak, making war with one or more of Europe's other
great powers more and more likely. The chemical industry was acutely
aware that its imports from Chile came mostly through British
traders--and that even if that were to change, the Royal Navy could
stop the trade by force. Hence the urgency with which Haber's
discovery was industrialised.

The Haber-Bosch process is widely taken to have prolonged Germany's
ability to fight the first world war. It also made possible the
extremities of the second, including the murder of more than a
million in Auschwitz by means of Zyklon B, an industrially produced
form of cyanide. It has been calculated that 6m tonnes of high
explosive were used in that war, and that over the 20th century
explosives used in war killed as many as 150m people.
Internal-combustion engines may have driven the tanks, planes and
ships. Fixed nitrogen made them into killing machines.

The effects of industrially produced nitrogen fertilisers were not so
quickly felt. By the 1930s Billingham, a wonder when opened the
decade before, had come to be seen as a drain on ici's resources. The
gains in agricultural productivity seen in the first half of the 20th
century mostly came from the mechanisation of field work by tractors,
combine harvesters and the like.

In the second half of the century, though, nitrogen really came into
its agricultural own, and plants like Billingham became Anthropocene
farming's umbilici mundi. The biggest factor in this was that plant
breeders--notably Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico for the
Rockefeller Foundation--learned how to breed crops particularly adept
at growing in highly fertilised soils. The task was, again, an urgent
one. The population was growing quickly, the risk of famine was taken
to be high. And, again, it had geopolitical ramifications; American
policymakers treated feeding Asia with a "green revolution" as a way
of averting the possibility of red ones.

Crops better at using nitrogen drove demand for nitrogen and other
fertilisers; abundant nitrogen drove demand for crops better at using
it. As new strains became available yields and nitrogen use climbed
inexorably; yields in India more than tripled between 1960 and 2000.
By the end of the century the researchers at Rothamsted were finding
that roughly 80% of the new varieties' impressive yield was down to
nitrogen fertiliser.

Human industry now fixes about 150m tonnes of nitrogen every year;
more than all the bacteria in all the soils of all the world.



On one side of Grebbeweg, a road just outside Veenendaal in the
central Netherlands, there is a bright grassy field. On the other
side, a meadow known as Hell. A nature reserve just a few hectares in
area, in the early winter De Hel has, at best, a melancholy charm.
The surface is waterlogged, the foliage an array of the world's least
vibrant shades of green. In spring, though, says Wieger Wamelink, an
ecologist from nearby Wageningen University, it sparkles with orchids
and buzzes with insects, an ecosystem revived thanks to what its soil
now lacks: nitrogen.

The natural nitrogen cycle balances itself; over time the amount of
nitrogen fixed from the atmosphere by bacteria equals the amount of
nitrogen stripped out of compounds in the soil and water and returned
to the air as N[2] by "denitrifying" bacteria.

In their eagerness to fertilise the land humans substantially
increased nitrogen fixation around the world while doing nothing to
increase the rate of denitrification: it currently runs at only 40%
or so of the rate at which nitrogen is added to the environment. As a
result, fixed nitrogen is building up in the planet's soils and
waters, as carbon dioxide is building up in its atmosphere.

And humans have fixed nitrogen unwittingly, too. The innards of
internal-combustion engines get hot enough to burn some of the
nitrogen in the air they take in along with their fuel. Forest fires
and biomass-burning put nitrogen from plants back into the air, too.
The total tonnage produced this way is a lot lower than the amount of
nitrogen fixed for use as fertiliser, but it adds disproportionately
to some of the problems: nitrogen oxides created this way go directly
into the air, which is where they do the most harm to human health.

Airborne nitrogen oxides increase the concentration of ozone, which
at ground level is a threat both to human health and to the health of
crops. Roughly 60% of the increase in ground-level ozone seen across
the 20th century can be associated with nitrogen-oxide emissions, and
current levels of ozone are held to be shortening over 150,000 lives
worldwide every year. According to Wim de Vries, another researcher
at Wageningen, they are costing the world between 3% and 16% of its
cereal production. They can also create little aerosol particles that
damage lungs, sometimes reacting with ammonia to produce tiny
particles of ammonium nitrate; in cities, roughly 30% of the
smallest, most-damaging particles contain nitrogen. Though car
exhausts dominate the production of these particles, modelling
suggests that halving Europe's agricultural emissions would reduce
the number of lives shortened by particulate air pollution on the
continent by 19%, sparing some 70,000 lives a year.

Eventually almost all of this airborne effluvium comes to the earth,
there to join the nitrogen added by farmers but spurned by their
crops. Unlike the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the nitrogen in
the soil does not just accumulate. It builds up in particular places;
it acidifies soils and it changes its chemical form. It does stuff.
It might return to the atmosphere as ammonia, or nitrous oxide; it
might dissolve in run-off as a nitrate ion and travel through streams
and rivers to the sea. Nitrogen given up by the soil in the form of
ammonia in one place can create an ammonium-nitrate particle in the
atmosphere, then fall back to Earth to fertilise a plant hundreds of
kilometres from where it started. After that plant dies and decays,
the nitrogen finds a bacterium keen to turn it into nitrous oxide, in
which form it then rises to the stratosphere. A century later--over
the span of which, because nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse
gas, it will have warmed the planet 300 times more than a molecule of
carbon dioxide would--a stray photon of ultraviolet light turns it
back into an ion, chemistry turns it into nitrogen dioxide and rain
washes it back to the soil.

One overarching aspect of this superabundance is the reduction of
biodiversity. Dr de Vries reckons that nitrogen deposition is, after
habitat destruction and climate change, the third greatest destroyer
of biodiversity in the world. A principal reason for this is that
some plants are better at using nitrogen than others. If nitrogen
levels are increased the plants that are good at using it get a
bigger boost than the rest, and outcompete them. Overall biomass may
well increase; biodiversity does not.

[20221224_XMD015]

The most spectacular examples of this effect are the dead zones now
frequently found where rivers that drain large agricultural basins
flow out into the sea. Nitrogen and phosphorus from farmlands
stimulate exponential growth in some species of algae, which bloom
until they have used up all the oxygen in the water. Creatures from
throughout the water column either die or come to the surface--there
to die at a later date. Over the second half of the 20th century such
dead zones became ten times more common as nitrogen flows into the
sea from farming grew by about half.

On land the same dynamics play out more subtly. The difference
between the orchid-free field dominated by a single type of grass on
one side of Grebbeweg and the multi-hued complexity on the other side
is that the nitrogen stocks of De Hel have been systematically
reduced, allowing species which are less good at using the nutrient
to hold their own better. To restore the nature reserve to a
pre-industrial state, conservationists stripped it of its topmost
layer of soil, in which most of the residual nitrogen was to be
found. They also started mowing it in early summer when the growing
blades of grass are nitrogen rich and making hay thus removes more
nitrogen than it would at other times.

For all this, De Hel still contains more nitrogen than it would have
centuries ago, when its sodden infertility won it its disparaging
name. And the amount is increasing, as more nitrogen is deposited
from the air. The same is true for most Dutch nature reserves, and
that has plunged the country into a complex and peculiarly
anthropocene crisis that feels like a forerunner of the future world.

After the famine the Netherlands suffered during the last winter of
the second world war, boosting food production became a national
priority, and that urgent desire for self sufficiency produced farms
that could expand on the country's historical success as a dairy
exporter. Today the Netherlands, which houses roughly 0.1% of the
world's cows on just 0.008% of its land surface, produces 4% of its
cheese. The remarkable productivity comes from fertilised meadows and
protein-rich concentrates which provide the cattle with all the
nitrogen they can use and more--a surplus they get rid of. Cowpats and
piss, particularly when mixed and left on the floor of a shed, are a
potent source of ammonia.

In 2015, after booming Chinese consumption saw enduring concerns
about overproduction ease, European Union caps on dairy production
were lifted and farmers invested in new cows and cowsheds. These
expansions received permits as part of the Dutch government's
"integrated approach to nitrogen", the pas, under which any activity
which will lead to nitrogen deposition, including building new homes,
needs a permit, and new permits are in principle balanced out by
reduced emissions elsewhere. In 2018, the European Court ruled that
the pas permits were not limiting nitrogen deposition on nature
reserves as well as eu law required. As a result of that decision,
the next year the Dutch high court ruled that no new permits could be
issued. No farms could expand; no new building works could be
undertaken. According to abn amro, a bank, projects worth EUR14bn
($15.7bn) were put at risk.

The government made room for some construction permits to be issued
by cutting the speed limit on the country's motorways from 130kph to
100kph, thus modestly reducing nitrogen-oxide emissions from cars.
But it also realised that it needed to do something about ammonia
from farms, which accounts for far more of the total deposition.
Fearing for their future, dairy farmers staged protests, with
tractors blockading city streets (and the Wageningen campus) and muck
spread around ministers' houses.

At the end of November 2022 the government sketched out the latest of
its approaches to the problem. It will look to 2,000 to 3,000 farms
in particularly sensitive areas to volunteer to be bought out. It
will encourage other measures to reduce ammonia production, including
more outdoor grazing and lower-protein concentrates in food. Jan
Willem Erisman of Leiden University says that, in principle, this
could be a way out of the immediate crisis--but warns that much could
still go wrong. And in the longer term, Dutch farmers are not wrong
to worry about a world in which their practices come under increasing
pressure, and in which the country's total herd is significantly
reduced.

The Netherlands has a particular history and geography, with soils
vulnerable to ammonia-induced acidification and the sort of dense
settlement to be expected around the delta of a major river such as
the Rhine. Its situation has been shaped by the quirks of Europe's
common market, subject to one-of-a-kind transnational regulation, and
the possibilities implicit in a world-trade system which makes it
easy to source nitrogen-rich concentrate from around the world and
ship dairy products to whoever most wants them. And it reflects a
distinct set of regulatory choices on arcana such as the maximum
permitted nitrogen-loading per hectare for various ecosystems and
whether a bulldozer's emissions matter more when starting a new
project than when finishing an old one.

But it is a particular instance of a pervasive set of issues: how to
deal with the fact that human politics and regulations are now
intimately involved in the flows of the fundamental stuff of life on
a scale that has impacts throughout the living world. The archetype
of these issues is that of carbon dioxide. Yet it is also, at the
moment, a conceptually simple one; the primary prescription is to
decouple human industry from the carbon cycle by renouncing fossil
fuels. The means of doing this lie within the human world of
economics and politics: do things differently or do things less.

Nitrogen is different. You cannot feed 10bn people without providing
them with nitrogen, and choices made about how that nitrogen is
provided will change life off farms as well as on it--not least
because, if you use less nitrogen, you will tend to use more land. In
most of Africa, the fastest growing continent, nitrogen remains as
yet too scarce. How is it to be made plentiful without a
recapitulation of the problems it has caused elsewhere?

A world which ate fewer animals would have less of a problem, because
the conversion of plant protein to animal protein is notoriously
inefficient, as the ammonia rising from cowsheds makes clear. But it
remains the case that, to many (including many who currently enjoy
only very little access to meat), life in a meat-free world is as
hard to reconcile with ideas about the good life as Crookes thought
life in a wheat-free world was.

So if a modern-day Crookes were to survey the world of nitrogen
surplus as their predecessor did the world of incipient nitrogen
shortage, with what mission should they charge their fellow
scientists? A reversal of what happens at Billingham--industrial
denitrification on the same scale as industrial nitrogen fixation--is
not possible. The nitrogen molecules in the mostly-nitrogen
atmosphere are infinitely fungible; whether you distil them from the
air over Teesside or Maharashtra makes no difference. The fixed
nitrogen is doing more harm in some places than others. And even when
it is concentrated, it is very diffuse. Fixation can start with an
atmosphere that is 78% N[2]. The pollutants denitrification would
need to deal with are measured in parts per billion.

Instead, look at moving from a macroscopic human intervention in the
cycle to a microscopic one: enlist the bacteria as allies. Pivot Bio,
an American startup, has identified strains of nitrogen-fixing
bacteria with which seeds can be treated before they are sown in
order to ensure that there is lots of nitrogen fixation going on in
the soil where they set their roots. Bayer, an agrochemical giant,
has been working with Ginkgo, the only big synthetic-biology firm, to
design bacteria that might do even better, and could be added to seed
before it was sold. In theory such treatments could provide crops
with as much nitrogen as they get from current fertilisers while
losing much less to the surrounding environment.

Breaking down the binary of plant and bacteria helps bridge the rift
between natural and industrial

Biologists armed with new gene-editing techniques have a more
ambitious scheme: endowing plants that are not legumes with the means
to build rhizomes, the symbiotic nodules in which legumes host their
own bespoke colonies of nitrogen fixers. This is hard. It requires
not just developing the genetic circuits needed to build the right
structures, but also those needed for plants to lure the bacteria
into those structures and respond to their needs.

Giles Oldroyd, who leads an effort to this end at Cambridge
University, sees it as a question of setting up a dialogue between
forms of life divided by billions of years of evolution. That gives
the science a pleasing symbolic resonance with its possible
application, breaking down the binary of plant and bacteria in order
to help bridge the rift between natural and industrial.

A world in which the human interaction with the nitrogen cycle is
dominated not by a few hundred Haber-Bosch plants, or a few hundred
million car exhausts, but instead farmed out to countless trillions
of bacteria in soils and rhizomes would be more efficient and
responsive, making the adaptation to local conditions that is hard
for users of today's fertilisers far easier.

Bulk production of ammonia might still go on, perhaps on a far
greater scale. It is possible that in a post-fossil-fuel world
hydrogen made by splitting water electrically could be traded
internationally. And because liquid hydrogen is tricky stuff, some
think that trade may take the form of ammonia; use the hydrogen for
Haber-Bosch in one place, transport the resultant ammonia over an
ocean in a tanker, crack it back into hydrogen and N[2] at the end
point. But such a trade would be designed to bypass life's nitrogen
cycle, putting all the inert nitrogen sucked up at one end back into
the air at the other.

In feeding plants and preserving nature there could be ever more care
to national circumstances, local soils and particular seeds. Not
exactly a repudiation of the muscular, commoditised modernity that
Haber-Bosch made possible, allowing the agriculture of inputs and
outputs to go global. But a radical rethinking of it, one suited to
an age where biological ways of doing things are becoming more
important than chemical ones, and where the environment is treated as
part of the process, not just a resource to strip and a dumping
ground for what has not been used.

Ambivalent as he was about the planned world he thought it heralded,
Aldous Huxley saw in Billingham:

    a vast co-operative work of art, the joint product of many
    separate creations, the visible manifestation, in a single
    co-ordinated whole, of countless individual thoughts...a poem of
    which the technicians and administrators are joint authors.

The Anthropocene nitrogen cycle is nothing like a work of art, let
alone a good one--not yet. It is overwrought, deformed and damaging,
shaped by necessity and desire, not care or grace. But it is,
happily, a work in progress. At the level of the field and the world,
jointly authored by farmers, citizens, microbes, landscapes,
consumers, forests, scientists and fields, not to mention technicians
and administrators, it may yet achieve a poetry of its own. #

ILLUSTRATIONS: Ibrahim Rayintakath

Correction (December 22nd 2022): In the original version of this
story the word "not" was omitted from the sentence "And if you are a
Briton who does source your food almost entirely from organic farms
(which eschew chemical fertilisers) something similar is true for
you". We regret the error.

For more coverage of climate change, sign up for the Climate Issue,
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This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print
edition under the headline "The wibbly-wobbly circle of life"

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