The History of Fertilizers

Overview

Fertilization of gardens and croplands has been around almost since the beginning of agriculture. Artificial fertilization, whether chemical or organic, seeks to replace nutrients in the soil that leeched out by repeated crop plantings on a piece of land. Although some agricultural experts recommend crop rotation as a solution to exhausting a patch of land, even farmers and gardeners practicing crop rotation often add various types of fertilizer to cultivated soils.

History

Early farmers were among the first to augment cultivated lands to increase crop yields and plant health. Native American farmers added fish to corn plantings--the bones of the fish adding calcium carbonate and the flesh and organs adding numerous organic nutrients. According to GardenSmarts.com, one of the earliest researchers into the chemistry behind soil fertilization was German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), who discovered that the three main chemical components of harvested plant tissues are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, or N-P-K. Seventy years later, another German chemist, Fritz Haber, discovered an economically feasible method for making nitrogen, thus making the manufacture of chemical fertilizers possible.

Function

The idea behind both organic and chemical fertilization is to replace chemicals in the soil that are commonly absorbed by plants as part of the process of growth and cultivation. As plants grow and use various soil chemicals, adding natural and artificial products to the soil makes them again available to plants growing in the soil.

Types

The history of plant fertilizers falls into two main groups: organic and chemical fertilizers. Early organic fertilizers derived from such natural sources as manure, leaves, fish and other animals. Modern organic fertilizers can be from compost or processed organic material such as waste from fish-processing plants. Chemical fertilizers are from a combination of synthetically produced and refined nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. Most chemical fertilizers show the ratio of the three elements on the package. A 5-10-5 fertilizer, for example, has 5 percent nitrogen, 10 percent potassium, and 5 percent phosphorous.

Benefits

The benefits of fertilization has been evident throughout history. Native American corn-planting techniques, which often include adding a small fish to each planting area, resulted in more productive corn plants that often produced larger ears of corn. Chemical fertilization increased crop yields dramatically over the 20th century, allowing the growth of large-scale commercial farms and lower prices for produce.

Considerations

The debate over organic verses chemical fertilization has been a vigorous one. Organic fertilization has a history over thousands of years, whereas commercial chemical fertilization only became available during the 20th century. Although chemical fertilization has increased commercial crop yields, proponents of organic fertilizers maintain that replacing only individual chemicals leaves the soil void of other necessary biological nutrients. Proponents of chemical fertilization argue that N-P-K fertilization has done more to increase food production at a lower cost than other advances in agriculture.