= Such Stupid Things =

Everyone out there in the Blogscape makes a point of posting about hot(t) new music, rock concerts attended and that sort of thing. I have little to contribute in that department, but I do read books sometimes. So why not post about that?

I just finished an interesting little book entitled "Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production". I thought it was going to be a biography of Fritz Haber, the German chemist who pioneered the production of synthetic ammonia. Sounds exciting, no? Well he's also called the "father of cheimcal warfare" - that do anything for you?

Anyhow, turns out I was slightly mistaken. The book was less of a biography and more about scientific examination of the role of nitrogen in the biosphere, and how the development of synthetically-fixed nitrogen seriously pushed back the limits of agricultural productivity. It's fascinating stuff, though I can accept that people outside the world of chemical engineering might not appreciate the lengthy discussions of process control in ammonia plants, or how you design a carbon steel reactor to withstand corrosion from hydrogen at 600 C and 200 atm, (answer: very carefully).

The interesting take-home message is that, aside from water, the rate-limiting step of protein production (i.e. building life) is the conversion of nitrogen from N2 gas into something usable. The author goes on to crunch a long series of numbers, calculating the total nitrogen flux from natural sources - there aren't many - as well as recyclable amounts from manure, etc. He concludes that natural ecosystems can only replace so much nitrogen, and that this rate falls far short of what's necessary to supply amino acids to six billion humans worldwide. So there's something to the tune of 2.4 billion people who simply couldn't be fed through traditional, organic farming, no matter how efficient you were. I won't go into all the details of his calculations, but it was kind of a hit to my hippy sensibilities. I have no basis by which to judge the accuracy of his numbers, but he seems to have done his homework. And this assumes that just about all of the world's cultivatable land is already in production, which is only kind-of true. If anyone knows of any counterarguments out there, I'd love to hear 'em.

Plus, the appendices are filled with all sorts of nifty facts, such as the elemental makeup of guano deposits on various South American islands. Amazingly, that was something farmers were concerned with back in the 1860's.