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 Vaclav Smil

Enriching the Earth

Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch,

and the Transformation
of World Food Production
Enriching the Earth
Also by Vaclav Smil
China’s Energy
Energy in the Developing World
Energy Analysis in Agriculture
Biomass Energies
The Bad Earth
Carbon Nitrogen Sulfur
Energy Food Environment
Energy in China’s Modernization
General Energetics
China’s Environmental Crisis
Global Ecology
Energy in World History
Cycles of Life
Energies
Feeding the World
Enriching the Earth
Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation
of World Food Production

Vaclav Smil

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by Achorn Graphic Services, Inc., and was printed and bound
in the United States of America.

Printed on recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smil, Vaclav.
Enriching the earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food
production / Vaclav Smil.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-262-19432-5 (hc: alk. paper)
1. Nitrogen fertilizers. 2. Ammonia as fertilizer. I. Title.
S651.S56 2000
631.8′4—dc21
00-026291
Cognitio contemplatioque naturae manca quodam modo atque inchoata sit, si nulla actio
rerum consequatur.

Knowledge and the study of nature would somehow be weak and incomplete if it were not
followed by practical results.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis, I(153)
Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Transforming the World xiii
1 Nitrogen in Agriculture 1
Discovering the Basics
Discovering Nitrogen 2
Nitrogen in Crop Production 5
Nitrogen and Legumes 13
Completing the Nitrogen Cycle 16
2 Traditional Sources of Nitrogen 21
Preindustrial Agricultures
Recycling of Organic Matter 22
Farmyard Manures 25
Cultivation of Legumes 28
Nitrogen Balances in Traditional Farming 31
Limits to Recycling and Legume Cultivation 35
3 New Sources of the Nutrient 39
Searching for Fixed Nitrogen
Guano 40
Sodium Nitrate 43
By-product Ammonia from Coking 48
Synthesis of Cyanamide 51
Electric Arc Process 53
Plant Nutrients and Future Food Supply 55
viii Contents

4 A Brilliant Discovery 61
Fritz Haber’s Synthesis of Ammonia
Haber’s Predecessors 61
Fritz Haber 65
Haber’s First Experiments with Ammonia 68
Nernst and Haber 70
BASF and Haber 74
High-Pressure Catalytic Synthesis 77
5 Creating an Industry 83
Carl Bosch and BASF
Carl Bosch 85
Designing High-Pressure Converters 87
Finding New Catalysts 93
Producing the Feedstocks and Oxidizing Ammonia 97
The First Ammonia Plant at Oppau 99
Ammonia Synthesis for War 103
6 Evolution of Ammonia Synthesis 109
Diffusion and Innovation
Slow Diffusion of Ammonia Production: 1918–1950 111
Expansion and Changes Since 1950 116
Natural Gas–Based Ammonia Synthesis 118
Single-Train Plants with Centrifugal Compressors 122
Continuing Innovation 127
7 Synthetic Fertilizers 133
Varieties and Applications
Nitrogen Fertilizers 134
Fertilizer Applications: Global Views 138
Fertilizer Nitrogen in Global Crop Production 143
Regional and National Perspectives 145
The Most Productive Agroecosystems 152
8 Our Dependence on Nitrogen 155
Agricultures and Populations
How Many People Does Fertilizer Nitrogen Feed? 156
Human Protein Requirements 161
 Contents ix

Nitrogen in U.S. Agriculture 164

Nitrogen in Chinese Farming 167
Growing Dependence during the Twenty-first Century 172
9 Consequences of the Dependence 177
Human Interference in Nitrogen’s Biospheric Cycle
Intensifying the Global Cycling of Nitrogen 178
What Happens to Fertilizer Nitrogen 180
Nitrogen Losses in Modern Farming 184
Excess Nitrogen and Human Health 188
Nitrogen and Natural Ecosystems 192
10 Nitrogen and Civilization 199
Managing the Nitrogen Cycle
What Has Been Accomplished 201
More Efficient Fertilizing 206
Stabilized Populations 211
Rational Diets 214
A Long View 217
Postscript 223
Appendixes 233
Notes 253
Name Index 329
Subject Index 331
Acknowledgments

As is always the case with interdisciplinary books, my most obvious debt is to hun-
dreds of experts—in this case mostly chemists, chemical engineers, historians, agron-
omists, and fertilizer, plant, and environmental scientists—whose work I have
consulted, used, and cited in this book.
Special thanks to Kristina Winzen of the BASF corporate archive in Ludwigshafen
for making available the company’s records on the early history of nitrogen fixation;
to Amitava Roy (president and CEO) and Jean Riley (senior librarian) of the Interna-
tional Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for access
to the center’s excellent library; to Rick Strait, Director for Fertilizers & Synthesis
Gas Chemicals of Kellogg Brown & Root in Houston, for information on advanced
ammonia synthesis; to Svend Erik Nielsen, Ammonia Technology Supervisor of
Haldor Topsøe in Lyngby, for publications on the company’s ammonia synthesis;
to Patrick Luciani, Director of the Canadian Donner Foundation in Toronto, whose
grant covered the cost of research trips to Ludwigshafen and Muscle Shoals; and to
E. T. York (Chairman of the IFDC Board) and Donald R. Waggoner for reviewing
the typescript.
Transforming the World

What has been the most important technical invention of the twentieth century?
Airplanes, nuclear energy, space flight, television, and computers are the most com-
mon answers. Yet none of these inventions has been as fundamentally important as
the industrial synthesis of ammonia from its elements. Lives of the world’s 6 billion
people might be actually better without Microsoft Windows and 600 TV channels,
and neither nuclear reactors nor space shuttles are critical determinants of human
well-being. But the single most important change affecting the world’s population—
its expansion from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to today’s 6 billion—would not have
been possible without the synthesis of ammonia.
In order to understand the significance of the link between the world’s population
growth and the synthesis of a pungent, colorless gas composed of one nitrogen and
three hydrogen atoms (appendix A), it is necessary to appreciate first the yin-yang
nature of nitrogen’s biospheric presence. The element is abundant in the biosphere,
making up almost 80% of the atmosphere’s volume, yet its usable forms are scarce;
and although living organisms need it in only small quantities, its shortage is com-
monly the most important factor that limits both crop production and human
growth. This paradox arises from nitrogen’s exceedingly stable atmospheric presence
as a nonreactive N2 molecule—and from the paucity of natural ways of transforming
this recalcitrant dinitrogen into reactive compounds.
The bulk of living matter is made up of polymerized sugars or alcohols (cellulose,
hemicellulose, and lignin) organized in wet tissues. Carbon, making up nearly half
of these compounds, is the principal structural element of life, the supplier of quan-
tity: in the biosphere it is about 100 times more abundant than nitrogen, which is
a key provider of quality. Although relatively scarce, nitrogen is present in every
living cell; in chlorophyll whose excitation by light energizes photosynthesis (the
xiv Transforming the World

biosphere’s most important conversion of energy); in the nucleotides of nucleic acids

(DNA and RNA), which store and process all genetic information; in amino acids,
which make up all proteins; and in enzymes which control the chemistry of the living
world. Consequently, Arthur Needham did not exaggerate the element’s importance
when he wrote that ‘‘every vital phenomenon is due to some change in a nitrogen
compound and indeed in the nitrogen atom of that compound.’’1 Nitrogen’s abun-
dance in plants cannot be missed: it is the nutrient responsible for the vigorous vege-
tative growth, for the deep green of the leaves, for their large size and delayed
senescence, as well as for the size and protein content of cereal grains, the staples
of mankind. Nitrogen deficiency cannot be missed either: pale green or yellowing
leaves, slow and stunted plant growth, low yields and depressed protein content of
seeds.
Nitrogen’s importance for human beings is no less critical. We have to ingest ten
complete, preformed essential amino acids in order to synthesize our body proteins
needed for tissue growth and maintenance. Stunted mental and physical development
are the starkest consequences of protein malnutrition. Agricultural crops supply al-
most 9/10 of those essential amino acids in food proteins, directly in staple cereal and
legume grains, indirectly in animal foods; the remainder of dietary proteins comes
from foods derived from grassland grazing and from aquatic species. But while pho-
tosynthesis draws readily on fairly small stores of CO2 in the atmosphere to get
the needed carbon, atmosphere’s huge dinitrogen store is highly nonreactive, and
availability of reactive nitrogen is almost always the most important factor limiting
the yields in intensive agricultures.
N2 molecules must be split into their two constituent atoms before they can be
incorporated into an enormous variety of organic and inorganic compounds. Light-
ning is the only physical process that can fix substantial amounts of nitrogen, that is,
to split the tightly bound molecule so the freed atoms can form reactive compounds.
Although we cannot pinpoint the annual flux of this high-energy fixation, its global
contribution clearly falls far short of agriculture’s nitrogen needs. And there is only
one group of living organisms capable of nitrogen fixation: about 100 bacterial gen-
era, most notably Rhizobium bacteria associated with the roots of leguminous
plants.
Not surprisingly, agricultures have been preoccupied with manipulating the flows
of reactive nitrogen. Traditional farming relied on a combination of increasingly
intensive recycling of organic wastes and cultivation of leguminous plants, but these
inputs were insufficient to sustain high crop yields over large cultivated areas. As
 Transforming the World xv

the concerns about future nitrogen shortages intensified during the latter half of the
nineteenth century, chemists tried to prepare ammonia, the simplest of all nitrogen
compounds, from its elements.
Industrial synthesis of ammonia thus does not belong to that fascinating class of
serendipitous inventions: the compound just did not appear by accident in some-
body’s laboratory. Its synthesis from nitrogen and hydrogen was sought for more
than 100 years, and by the beginning of the twentieth century it became one of
the holy grails of synthetic inorganic chemistry. We can pinpoint—much like with
Edison’s lightbulb or the Wright brothers’ flight—the time of the decisive break-
through. Archives of Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik (BASF) in Ludwigshafen con-
tain a letter that Fritz Haber, at that time a professor of physical chemistry and
electrochemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Karslruhe, sent on July 3, 1909,
to the company’s directors. In it he described the events of the previous day, when
two BASF chemists came to witness the first successful demonstration of the synthesis
in his laboratory.
Haber’s invention was translated with an unprecedented rapidity into a commer-
cial synthetic process by Carl Bosch. The Haber–Bosch process was the break-
through that removed the most ubiquitous limit on crop yields, opening the way for
the development and adoption of high-yielding cultivars and for the multiplication
of global harvests. Today’s ammonia synthesis has been greatly improved in many
details and it operates with much higher energy efficiencies; but Haber and Bosch
would easily recognize all principal features of their invention. Global output of
ammonia is now about 130 million tonnes (that is, about 110 million tonnes of fixed
nitrogen), and 4/5 of it go into fertilizers, of which urea is by far most important.
Rich countries could fertilize much less by cutting their excessive food production
in general, and by reducing their high intakes of animal foods in particular—but even
the most assiduous recycling of all organic wastes and the widest practical planting of
legumes could not supply enough nitrogen for land-scarce, poor, and populous na-
tions. All the children to be seen running around or leading docile water buffaloes
in China’s southern provinces, throughout the Nile Delta, or in the manicured land-
scapes of Java got their body proteins, via urea their parents spread on bunded fields,
from the Haber–Bosch synthesis of ammonia. Without this synthesis about 2/5 of the
world’s population would not be around—and the dependence will only increase
as the global count moves from 6 to 9 or 10 billion people.
Without synthetic ammonia today’s global population would not stand at six bil-
lion people, but the process also raised the human intervention in the nitrogen cycle
xvi Transforming the World

to an entirely new level. Ammonia is now one of the two most important synthetic
compounds, and the ammonia industry is comprised of hundreds of mostly large
plants that feed subsequent syntheses of various nitrogen fertilizer compounds. An
adult contains about 1 kilogram of nitrogen in body tissues, but in many countries
annual fertilizer applications now prorate to more than 50 kilograms of nitrogen
per capita (the global mean is about 13 kilograms).
While the world’s population stores no more than about 6 million tonnes of nitro-
gen (less than one-billionth of the atmosphere’s enormous nitrogen stores), in order
to maintain, and to gradually expand, this negligible reservoir, the reactive nitrogen
in synthetic fertilizers is now perhaps equal to half of the total fixed by all bacteria
in all natural terrestrial ecosystems. Moreover, in every intensively cultivated region,
and especially where large-scale agriculture neighbors cities and industry, inputs
from human activity are greatly surpassing natural flows of fixed nitrogen. On
smaller scales, from local watersheds to individual fields, they dominate natural flows
by more than an order of magnitude.
Transformations of these nitrogen inputs intensify the rates of microbial pro-
cessing and increase the atmospheric emissions and deposition of nitrogen com-
pounds and their leaching to fresh and coastal waters. We are thus fertilizing not
just fields but, indirectly, also many natural ecosystems—and interfering in nitro-
gen’s natural flows to a much higher extent than in the case of other biospheric
cycles.
The fascinating story of nitrogen thus has many facets, many beginnings, and
many consequences: traditional agronomy and modern biochemistry, ancient knowl-
edge of valuable legumes, the creation of new industry at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, the quest for food self-sufficiency and prosperity, and large-scale
environmental changes with consequences ranging, literally, from deep wells to the
stratosphere.
All of these realities will be taken up in considerable detail in this book. I will
first describe nitrogen’s unique and indispensable status in the biosphere, its role in
crop production, and the traditional means of supplying the nutrient. Then I will
concentrate on various attempts to expand natural nitrogen flows by introduction
of mineral and synthetic fertilizers. The core of the book is a detailed narrative of the
epochal discovery of ammonia synthesis by Fritz Haber and its commercialization by
Carl Bosch and BASF.
Subsequent chapters trace the emergence of the large-scale nitrogen fertilizer in-
dustry and its various products and analyze the extent of global, and national, depen-
 Transforming the World xvii

dence on the Haber–Bosch process and its biospheric consequences. I close by

looking back—and looking ahead—at the role of nitrogen in civilization. And, in
a sad coda to the story, I attach a short postscript describing the lives of Carl Bosch
and Fritz Haber after the discovery of ammonia synthesis.

By trying to make the book as comprehensive, and as interdisciplinary, as possible,

I recognize that I made its reading harder, or less interesting, for many people who
are only curious about some parts of the whole. They should go ahead and create
their own books within the book: agronomists can concentrate on chapters 1–3 and
7–9, ecologists on chapters 1–2 and 8–10, historians of technology on chapters 2–
6. My hope is that both kinds of readers—those who skip some chapters, and those
who persevere and read the whole book—will get new perspectives on how the syn-
thesis of ammonia from its elements came about, and how its diffusion has trans-
formed the world and enriched the Earth.
Enriching the Earth
1
Nitrogen in Agriculture
Discovering the Basics

The uncovering of the complex relations among the atmosphere, plants, and soil
could begin only with the birth of modern chemistry, the process dating to the last
three decades of the eighteenth century.1 Its progress was relatively rapid but uneven.
Fundamentals of photosynthesis were among the first puzzles to be solved during
the 1770s, thanks largely to the ingenious experiments of Joseph Priestley (1733–
1804), an English minister, librarian, and private tutor, and Jan Ingenhousz (1730–
1799), a Dutch physician.2 Stated in modern terms (standard chemical nomenclature
was codified only a few decades after these experiments took place), atmospheric
CO 2 was identified as the source of carbon for photosynthesis, complex carbohy-
drates its principal products, and O 2 an essential by-product.
Ingenhousz also determined that solar radiation is the energy source of photosyn-
thesis, discovered that the process takes place only in the leaves and green stalks,
and was aware of its reversibility (plant respiration releasing CO 2 ) during the night.3
He also believed, incorrectly, that atmospheric nitrogen can be directly assimilated
by plants. This was denied by Nicholas Theodore de Saussure (1767–1845), a Swiss
chemist and plant physiologist, who showed in 1804 that plants can be grown in
clean sand and that water can carry to the roots all nutrients, including nitrogen,
required for photosynthesis.4
In spite of these experiments the idea that humus (a mixture of complex organic
compounds resulting from the decomposition of biomass) is the dominant source of
carbon, as well as other elements needed by plants, remained highly influential. The
humus theory was favored by writings of Daniel Thaer (1752–1828), a Prussian
professor of agriculture,5 and de Saussure himself continued to believe that humus
has a key role in plant growth; it was resolutely defeated only two generations later.
Karl Sprengel (1787–1859) and Justus von Liebig (1803–1873) deserve most of
the credit for disproving the humus theory.6 Liebig demonstrated beyond any doubt
2 Chapter 1

that plants can grow solely with inputs of inorganic compounds. This meant that
plants accelerate the cycling of many elements by transferring them from inorganic
stores in the air, soils, and water and concentrating them in plant tissues. But Liebig
was on the losing side of another controversy that also took a long time to settle:
the debate on the nature of biomass decomposition, the process that returns carbon,
nitrogen, and other nutrients bound in complex organic tissues to simpler inorganic
compounds that are once again available for assimilation by plants. During the
1830s he maintained that the decomposition of organic matter into acids and alco-
hols is nothing but a purely inorganic chemical reaction.7
Thanks to more powerful microscopes, Theodor Schwann (1810–1882) and
Charles Cagniard-Latour (1777–1859) were able to observe a clear correlation be-
tween growing Saccharomyces yeasts and alcoholic fermentation of grape juice, but
Liebig retorted with a mechanistic explanation: atomic motions of the fermenting
yeasts were breaking up molecules of grape sugar.8 The convincing explanation came
in 1857 with Louis Pasteur’s (1822–1895) demonstration of the microbial nature
of organic decomposition, but the process of biomass breakdown was satisfactorily
explained only after Hans Buchner’s (1850–1902) accidental discovery of the first
enzyme in 1897 opened a new era of biochemistry.9

Discovering Nitrogen

Advances in the early understanding of intricate transfers of nitrogen among the

atmosphere, soils, waters, and living organisms were no less complicated and con-
troversial than was the elucidation of carbon pathways in photosynthesis, res-
piration, and decay. First realizations that a peculiar gas makes up most of the
atmosphere came during the 1770s, when several pioneering chemists discovered
nitrogen while trying to decompose the air and investigate various modes of combus-
tion.10
Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786), a Swedish chemist, did his first experiments
to prepare oxygen by heating saltpeter (KNO 3 ) in 1770 (fig. 1.1). He was also the
first scientist who realized, sometime between 1771 and 1772, that ‘‘the air consists
of two fluids differing from each other, the one which does not manifest in the least
the property of attracting phlogiston, whilst the other . . . is peculiarly disposed to
such attraction.’’ 11 The latter ‘‘fluid’’ (writing in German and Swedish, he called it
Feuerluft or elds luft, fire air) is obviously oxygen, the former one (verdorbene Luft
or skamd luft, spoiled or vitiated air) is nitrogen.
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 3

Figure 1.1
Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786). Courtesy of the E. F. Smith Collection, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Concurrently (in 1772) and independently, Daniel Rutherford (1749–1819), a

botany professor in Edinburgh, experimented with mice breathing in a confined vol-
ume of air from which the respired CO 2 (‘‘fixed air’’) was then removed by caustic
potash solution. He discovered a residue of aer malignus that killed the rodents and
extinguished his flame but, unlike CO 2 , did not precipitate lime water and was not
absorbed by alkalis.12 Several years later Priestley found that air bubbling from Bath
water was, by volume, 1/20 ‘‘fixed air’’ (i.e., CO 2 ) and that the rest was ‘‘almost
perfectly noxious’’ air.13
The element emerged also during extensive combustion experiments performed
by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794), the century’s greatest chemist, during
the 1770s (fig. 1.2). Nitrogen was the ‘‘nonvital air’’ left behind after the air’s ‘‘vital
air’’ reacted with various tested chemicals.14 The founder of modern chemistry, who
proposed oxygène as the new name for ‘‘vital air,’’ did not give a new name to
‘‘phlogisticated’’ or ‘‘mephitic air.’’ According to Guyton de Morveau, the principal
author (with Lavoisier, Berthollet, and de Fourcroy) of Méthode de Nomenclature
Chimique, published in 1787, it was a group decision. Lavoisier wrote two years
later:
4 Chapter 1

Figure 1.2
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794). Courtesy of the E. F. Smith Collection, Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

The chemical properties of the noxious portion of the atmospheric air being hitherto but
little known, we have been satisfied to derive the name of its base from its known quality of
killing such animals as are forced to breathe it, giving it the name of azote, from the Greek
privative particle α, and ζωή, vita. . . . We cannot deny that this name appears somewhat
extraordinary.15
But the choice appears natural from the point of the element’s properties: the
gas is odorless, colorless, nonflammable, nonexplosive, nontoxic—and nonreactive
under normal environmental conditions. In 1790, four years before Lavoisier’s life
was cut short by Marat’s guillotine, Jean Antoine Claude Chaptal (1756–1832)
named the gas nitrogène. This designation refers obviously to the element’s presence
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 5

in nitre (potassium nitrate), a name whose triple-consonant root goes, via Greek,
all the way back to ancient Egyptian.16 Of course, the French and the Russians
still use the old name (azote and azot), and Germans cling to the onomatopoeic
Stickstoff.
Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748–1822) had already shown during the 1780s that
‘‘all animal substances contain azote, which is readily evolved by the action of nitric
acid in the cold.’’ 17 Subsequent rapid advances in organic analysis and in experimen-
tal agronomy left no doubt about nitrogen’s key presence in the biosphere and about
its indispensable role in crop production. Four researchers made particularly out-
standing contributions: Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1802–1887), Justus von Liebig
(1803–1873), John Bennet Lawes (1814–1900), and Joseph Henry Gilbert (1817–
1901).

Nitrogen in Crop Production

Boussingault had a career as a mining expert and a professor of chemistry in Bogotá

and Lyon before he settled in 1836 on his father-in-law’s farm in Alsace, which
became the site of his experiments on crop rotations, manuring, and sources of plant
nitrogen (fig. 1.3).18 He concluded that the nutritional value of fertilizers is propor-
tional to their nitrogen content.19 Later he published impressively accurate analyses
of nitrogen content of about eighty different organic materials, including all major
crops, their residues, animal wastes, and an assortment of organic wastes ranging
from dried animal blood to spoiled salted cod (appendix B).20
Boussingault was also a good conceptualizer. One of the most eloquent descrip-
tions of nitrogen’s key biospheric role appeared in a lecture he co-authored with
Jean-Baptiste André Dumas (1800–1884) for the conclusion of Dumas’s 1841 course
at the École de Medicine at the Sorbonne. Inevitably, the text has factual deficiencies.
Most importantly, the authors had no inkling of nitrogen fixation by bacteria, the
process of splitting the nonreactive molecule of atmospheric dinitrogen and incorpo-
rating the element into ammonia (NH 3 ), which can be used by plants.
Consequently, the authors greatly overestimated the importance of lighting in
forming reactive nitrogen.21 But the lecture’s dramatic narrative still reads well more
than 150 years later:
As it is from the mouths of volcanoes, then, whose convulsions often make the crust of our
globe to tremble, that the principal food of plants, carbonic acid, is incessantly poured out;
so it is from the atmosphere on fire with lightnings, from the bosom of the tempest, that the
6 Chapter 1

Figure 1.3
Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1802–1887). Courtesy of the E. F. Smith Collection, Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

second and scarcely less indispensable aliment of plants, nitrate of ammonia, is showered
down for their behoof. . . . Scarcely are carbonic acid and nitrate of ammonia formed, than
a calmer, though not less energetic force begins to act upon them for new purposes: this force
is light. By the agency of light, carbonic acid yields up its carbon, water its hydrogen, nitrate
of ammonia its nitrogen. These elements combine, organic matters are formed, and the earth
is clothed with verdure.22
Liebig’s contributions were even more far-ranging: during the first half of the nine-
teenth century no scientist shaped the debate on the chemical foundations of agricul-
ture as much as he did (fig. 1.4).23 Trained in Bonn, Erlangen, and Paris, Liebig was,
together with his lifelong friend Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882), one of the founders
of organic chemistry in general, and of accurate organic analysis in particular.24 His
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 7

Figure 1.4
Justus von Liebig (1803–1873). From the author’s collection.

activities ranged from the editorship of the era’s leading pharmacology journal to
investigating reports of spontaneous combustion of human bodies. Among his more
than 2,000 publications are numerous detailed and elaborate analyses of organic
compounds as well as broad conceptualizations and grand generalizations.
In agricultural studies Liebig’s name remains most commonly invoked because of
his law of the minimum: plant growth is limited by the element, or the compound,
that is present in the soil in the least adequate amount.25 Liebig’s most famous
summary of the understanding of the nitrogen cycle and nutrient needs in agricul-
ture came with the publication of Die organische Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf
Agricultur und Physiologie.26 Eventually there were ten German, six English, and
8 Chapter 1

nineteen American editions, as well as translations in all the other major European
languages. The text, which grew from 195 pages of the first edition to 1,150 pages
twenty-two years later, is a fascinating mixture of lasting truths, exaggerated conclu-
sions, and plainly erroneous assumptions—but, as it turned out, Liebig’s errors were
no less influential for our understanding of nitrogen’s role in agriculture than his
enduring generalizations.
Although organic chemistry was at its very beginning, Liebig’s explanations of
basic chemical processes in the nutrition of plants today need only slight emendations
rather than fundamental rewriting. He was one of the first scientists to offer a coher-
ent image of global biospheric cycles:
Carbonic acid, water and ammonia, contain the elements necessary for the support of animals
and vegetables. The same substances are the ultimate products of the chemical processes of
decay and putrefaction. All the innumerable products of vitality resume, after death, the origi-
nal form from which they sprung. And thus death—the complete dissolution of an existing
generation—becomes the sources of life for a new one.27

He recognized the critical importance of nitrogen in farming by juxtaposing agricul-

ture and forestry:
Agriculture differs essentially from the cultivation of forests, inasmuch as its principal object
consists in the production of nitrogen under any form capable of assimilation; whilst the object
of forest culture is confined to the production of carbon.28

After noting nitrogen’s ‘‘indifference to all other substances, and apparent reluctance
to enter into combination with them,’’ he stressed its importance and its incessant
biospheric cycling:
Yet nitrogen is an invariable constituent of plants, and during their life is subject to the control
of the vital powers. But when the mysterious principle of life has ceased to exercise its influ-
ence, this element resumes its chemical character, and materially assists in promoting the decay
of vegetable matter, by escaping from the compounds of which it formed a constituent.29

By the late 1830s the liberation of nitrogen from complex organic compounds
and its return to simpler inorganic forms were well-accepted facts, but the question
Liebig posed on the origin and assimilation of nitrogen—‘‘How and in what form
does nature furnish nitrogen to vegetable albumen, and gluten, to fruits and
seeds?’’—remained to be answered. Liebig thought that ‘‘this question is susceptible
of a very simple solution.’’ 30
His analyses of animal manures, which contain (especially after prolonged storage)
only small amounts of nitrogen, convinced him that their recycling cannot be the
most important source of the element for crops. The element’s ‘‘indifference’’ led
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 9

Liebig to conclude, correctly, that ‘‘we have not the slightest reason for believing
that the nitrogen of the atmosphere takes part in the process of assimilation of
plants.’’ 31 But in his search for the source of the nutrient he erred by ascribing all
of the nitrogen available to plants to ammonia present in precipitation. By what
seemed to him to be a process of logical elimination he identified the atmosphere as
the only source of agricultural nitrogen that was at least balancing, and often sur-
passing, the amount of the nutrient removed annually by crop harvests: ‘‘Whence,
we may ask, comes this increase of nitrogen? The nitrogen in the excrements cannot
reproduce itself, and the earth cannot yield it. Plants, and consequently animals,
must, therefore, derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.’’ 32
In the first edition of Chemistry he stressed that this supply is not sufficient to
maintain good harvests: ‘‘Cultivated plants receive the same quantity of nitrogen
from the atmosphere as trees, shrubs, and other wild plants; and this is not sufficient
for the purposes of agriculture.’’ 33 Three years later, in the book’s third edition, he
made a complete reversal by dismissing any need for additional applications of am-
monia or nitrates and changing the passage to ‘‘and this is quite sufficient for the
purposes of agriculture.’’ He stressed the point:
It is of great importance for agriculture, to know with certainty that the supply of ammonia
is unnecessary for most of our cultivated plants, and that it may even be superfluous, if only
the soil contains a sufficient supply of the mineral food of plants, when the ammonia required
for their development will be furnished by the atmosphere.34

This belief was based on his exaggerated estimates of ammonia typically present
in the atmosphere. At that time there were no analytical methods sensitive enough
to register ammonia’s low concentrations in the atmosphere, but as the compound
could be always detected in rain and snow water, and as it is so commonly the final
product of organic decomposition, Liebig argued correctly ‘‘that it is invari-
ably present in the atmosphere.’’ In the only quantitative example he provided in
his book, he assumed that ‘‘if a pound of rain-water contains only 1/4 th of a grain
of ammonia, than a field of 26,910 square feet must receive annually upwards of
88 lbs. of ammonia, or 71 lbs. of nitrogen.’’ 35
That assumption, equal in metric units to about 35 mg NH 4 /L, was much too
liberal. Recent worldwide measurements of the chemical composition of precipita-
tion show values ranging mostly between 0.1 and 1 mg/L, with the U.S. continental
mean of about 0.3 mg/L.36 Given the much less concentrated and much less pro-
ductive agricultural activities of the first half of the nineteenth century, typical
concentrations of ammonia in Europe in the 1840s could not have been above
10 Chapter 1

today’s levels.37 Extensive monitoring of nitrogen deposition shows typical rates of

just a few kg NH 3-N/ha, values generally two orders of magnitude smaller than
Liebig’s assumed mean, which implies average annual deposition of almost 130 kg
N/ha.38
Because of the constant supply of atmospheric ammonia, and because even the
poorest sandy soils contain relatively large amounts of the compound, Liebig be-
lieved that ‘‘the soil cannot be exhausted by the exportation of products containing
nitrogen (unless these products contain at the same time a large amount of mineral
ingredients).’’ 39 What was not known at that time is that normally only a very small
share of that ammonia is readily available to plants, with the bulk of the compound
fixed within the crystalline lattices of soil clays.40 Liebig also erred by believing that
analyzing crop ashes provides a reliable guide for the crop’s nutritional requirements
and for the rate of the needed mineral applications.
Obviously, in contrast to ammonia, numerous mineral elements required for plant
growth cannot be supplied from the atmosphere, and so Liebig argued that their
provision is the critical challenge in maintaining long-term agricultural productivity.
He became convinced that what soils lacked most were the minerals. By analyzing
the ash content of crops he divided them into ‘‘potash’’ (beets, turnips, potatoes,
corn), ‘‘lime’’ (legumes and tobacco), and ‘‘silica’’ (wheat, oats, rye, barley) plants,
and he believed that if appropriate minerals were added according to the kind of
crop, then the harvests could continue indefinitely without fallowing.41
This rigid adherence to mineral theory left only a marginal place for nitrogenous
fertilizers in Liebig’s otherwise correct vision of the future agriculture. He thought
that ammonia compounds merely facilitate the absorption of minerals by increasing
their solubility, but that ‘‘A time will come when fields will be manured with a solu-
tion of glass (silicate of potash), with the ashes of burnt straw, and with the salts
of phosphoric acid prepared in chemical manufactories, exactly as at present medi-
cines are given for fever and goitre.’’ 42
In 1843 he told British prime minister Robert Peel that ‘‘the most indispensable
nourishment taken up from the soil is the phosphate of lime,’’ 43 and two years later
he began marketing in England his line of low-solubility mineral fertilizers. These
mixes were prepared from plant ashes, gypsum, calcined bones, potassium silicate,
and magnesium sulfate. Even those mixtures that contained some ammonium sulfate
had too little nitrogen to become commercially successful, and the enterprise,
launched jointly with Sheridan Muspratt (1793–1886), an alkali manufacturer in
Liverpool, failed after only about three years.44
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 11

Liebig’s incorrect but aggressively held opinion that plants receive all of their nitro-
gen from the atmospheric deposition and benefit only from mineral fertilizer had a
very beneficial effect: it inspired a series of field trials that still continue as the world’s
longest-running crop experiment. In 1843 John Bennet Lawes (fig. 1.5, an Eton- and
Oxford-educated landowner, began experimenting with unfertilized and variously
fertilized crops on Broadbalk field in Rothamsted, a family estate in Hertfordshire
he inherited in 1834. In the same year he invited Joseph Henry Gilbert, a young
chemist with a doctorate from Liebig’s laboratory, to help with the design of experi-
ments and to perform the necessary chemical analyses, a cooperative effort that
ended only with Lawes’s death.45

Figure 1.5
John Bennet Lawes (1814–1900). Courtesy of Rothamsted Experimental Station, Harpenden,
Hertfordshire, England.
12 Chapter 1

In order to test the validity of Liebig’s mineral theory, Lawes and Gilbert began
continuous cultivation of wheat on plots receiving either no fertilizer or the following
combinations of nutrients: minerals only (P, K, Na, Mg), minerals with nitrogen, or
farmyard manure. A decade later there was no doubt that adding only the minerals
recommended by Liebig produced no significant increase in grain yields when com-
pared to plots receiving no fertilizer. In contrast, plots receiving combination of min-
erals and higher rates of ammonium sulfate had yields roughly twice as high as those
treated only with minerals, and their yields were also somewhat higher than those
produced with applications of farmyard manure.46
Unyieldingly, Liebig, in a confidential letter to his friend, wondered how ‘‘such a
set of swindlers’’ could produce research that ‘‘is all humbug, most impudent hum-
bug.’’ 47 Publicly, he claimed that the Rothamsted experiments actually support his
mineral theory, emphasizing again his view that ammonium fertilizer acts merely as
a facilitator for the absorption of minerals by increasing their solubility. That was
arguing against the evidence. Rothamsted results showed that clover, even when
grown in the absence of any ammonia, removed more minerals than did grain crops
while acquiring a much larger concentration of nitrogen, and that the succeeding
wheat crop withdrew quantities of minerals as large as the previous crop even when
it was not assisted by any ammonia fertilizers.
Rothamsted experiments also proved beyond any doubt that applications of nitro-
gen fertilizers offered the best path to higher grain crop yields; after nitrogen, phos-
phorus was the most important nutrient in raising the yields. Lawes concluded that
it is ‘‘hardly possible to have two opinions on the subject.’’ 48 Moreover, in 1853,
ten years after Liebig reversed his position on the sufficiency of atmospheric nitrogen,
his claim concerning the magnitude of airborne ammonia available to crops was
disproved. Boussingault and George Ville (1824–1899) published careful, long-term
measurements proving that the amount of ammonia in rain is much less than was
assumed by Liebig; and two years after these French studies Lawes and Gilbert dem-
onstrated that the total amount of atmospheric ammonia absorbed by soils is far
below the mass of the nutrient assimilated by crops.49
Several key facts concerning nitrogen in agriculture were thus clear by the begin-
ning of the second half of the nineteenth century: the element’s ubiquitous presence
in plant and animal tissues, its indispensability for vigorous plant growth, its con-
stant cycling between organic and inorganic compounds, and beneficial effects of
its application on grain crop yields. But many questions remained unanswered, the
foremost one being the ability of leguminous crops to thrive without any additions
of nitrogen.
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 13

Nitrogen and Legumes

In 1838 Boussingault became the first researcher to demonstrate that legumes can
restore nitrogen to the soil.50 He showed that clover could be grown in sterilized
sand that could not be a source of any nitrogen, and that clover and peas grown
without any additions of fertilizer in open pots of sterile sand could do something
wheat or oats were not capable of: they actually increased the sand’s nitrogen content
by the time of the harvest. The only obvious explanation of these puzzling phenom-
ena was that legumes had an ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen directly—but he
could not explain how they could do it. Nor could anybody else for almost another
fifty years—and not for any want of trying.
Boussingault’s experiments during the 1850s—done with lupins, beans, and oats
grown in large closed glass containers, some without an air flow, others receiving a
current of washed air enriched with CO 2 —showed either no changes or small losses
of nitrogen, leading him to conclude that the plants did not assimilate any free nitro-
gen from the atmosphere.51 Similarly, an extensive series of experiments done at
Rothamsted in 1857 and 1858 failed to show any substantial difference among non-
leguminous and leguminous species grown in glass bells in sterilized soil and supplied
with purified air and water: both kinds of plants did poorly, and neither could assimi-
late the atmospheric nitrogen.52
But under field conditions legumes clearly did acquire more nitrogen than indi-
cated by the totals derived from seeds, and from nitrogen compounds present in soils
and water. A clover plot at Rothamsted showed particularly high nitrogen yields:
in 1855 more than 400 kg N/ha were harvested from this plot, and the average for
the years 1856–1863 was almost 280 kg N/ha.53 There had to be another source of
nitrogen aside from the measured inputs. Lawes and Gilbert believed that large stores
of reactive nitrogen in fertile soils might be the best explanation of the puzzle, as
both of them, together with Boussingault, continued to discount the possibility that
plants could use atmospheric nitrogen.
They also did not connect the unexplained capacity of leguminous plants with the
obvious nodules on their roots (fig. 1.6). During the 1870s and 1880s the nodules
were considered to be absorptive roots, storage organs, or products of plant associa-
tion with fungi.54 The first hint of a solution came in 1885 when Marcelin Berthelot
(1827–1907) noted that nitrogen gas can be absorbed and fixed in an unknown way
in uncultivated clay soil in pots—but not when the soil was sterilized: it appeared
that something in the soil, rather than something in the plant, could be carrying out
nitrogen fixation. But then why would legumes be so much better at it?
14 Chapter 1

Figure 1.6
An early depiction of root nodules of Vicia faba by Malpighi (1679).

The breakthrough came a year later when in September 1886 Hermann Hellriegel
(1831–1895) reported to the 59th Conference of German Natural Scientists and
Physicians held in Berlin on the experiments he had done together with Hermann
Wilfarth (1853–1904) during several months preceding the meeting.55 These experi-
ments arose from trials done with potted crops over the previous three years. Com-
parisons of the average weight of seeds and crop residues (cereal straw and legume
vines) harvested at the end of the growing period showed that cereal yields responded
in an almost perfectly linear manner to additions of nitrogen (as calcium nitrate,
Ca(NO 3 ) 2 ). In contrast, the response of legumes was unpredictable, and unrelated
either to investigated species and soil types or to environmental conditions and agro-
nomic practices.
Hellriegel and Wilfarth advanced three hypotheses: that the erratic responses in
legumes were caused by an unknown uncontrolled property residing in the soil; that
this activity should be transferable; and, if it is of microbial origin, that it should
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 15

be inactivated by heat. To test their hypotheses, they added either a suspension of

raw or sterilized soil to pea plants growing in a sterile medium free of combined
nitrogen. Addition of raw soil inoculum increased yields dramatically.
A more elaborate set of experiments followed immediately, comparing the re-
sponses of five species of nonleguminous and six kinds of leguminous crops both
to additions of calcium nitrate and to soil suspensions prepared by decanting the
supernatant from a vigorous mixing of two kinds of fresh topsoil, loamy marl, and
glacial sand soil with five times its mass of distilled water. While cereals and oil crops
showed a good response to nitrate and none to soil suspensions, legumes responded
erratically to nitrate but strongly to added suspensions, with peas, clover, and beans
growing better in the presence of loamy soil inoculum.
Potted plants from these persuasive experiments were displayed at the Berlin meet-
ing. There could be no doubt about the microbial origins of nitrogen fixation, and
Hellriegel and Wilfarth correctly concluded that nodules, so obvious on roots of
vigorously growing legumes, were not just the storage organs of nitrogen but the
sites where the fixation took place.
Additional experiments during 1887 confirmed the original conclusions, and in
1888 Hellriegel and Wilfarth published a detailed account of their research whose
basic conclusions remain unchanged more than a century later:
The behavior of the Leguminosae is fundamentally different from the Gramineae in regard
to the absorption of their nitrogenous nutrition. The Gramineae are solely dependent on the
assimilable nitrogenous compounds present in the soil, and their development always stands
in direct relation to the nitrogenous supply available in the soil. To the Leguminosae a second
source is available besides the nitrogen of the soil, from which they are able in a highly efficient
manner to cover their needs entirely or in part, in case the first source is insufficient. The free
elemental nitrogen of the air is this second source. The Leguminosae do not themselves posses
the ability to assimilate the free nitrogen of the air, but the active participation of living micro-
organisms in the soil is absolutely necessary. . . . [I]t is necessary that certain kinds of the
latter enter into a symbiotic relation with the former.56
Although there was some inevitable initial scepticism, the findings of symbiotic
nitrogen fixation in legumes received rapid experimental verification in a number of
European and American research centers. The first species of Rhizobium bacteria,
one of only three genera responsible for symbiotic fixation in legumes, was isolated
from pea nodules a year later by Martinus Beijerinck (1851–1931), a Dutch microbi-
ologist.57 Other rhizobia, and many species of nonsymbiotic, free-living nitrogen fix-
ers, were reported within five years of Hellriegel’s discovery. And in 1889 Albert
Frank (1839–1900), who initially questioned Hellriegel’s report, discovered the first
case of nitrogen fixation in cyanobacteria, at that time classified as blue-green algae.58
16 Chapter 1

Completing the Nitrogen Cycle

Discovery of bacterial nitrogen fixation was yet another impressive illustration of

the critical dependence of the element’s biospheric pathways on microorganisms.
Less than a decade before Hellriegel’s lecture, a convincing experiment demonstrated
the bacterial origins of nitrification, conversion of ammonia to nitrate. This reaction
is of great importance for all crops because nitrates are much more soluble than
ammonia is, and plant roots can absorb them more readily from solutions in soil.
But it was only in 1877 when Théophile Schloesing (1824–1919) designed a con-
vincing experiment proving the bacterial origins of nitrification.59 All of the ammonia
in sewage trickling through a tube filled with sand and chalk was converted to nitrate
in a few days. Addition of chloroform to the liquid terminated the process by killing
all microbes, but recharging of the tube with a small lump of fresh soil restarted the
conversion. But identifying the bacteria responsible for the oxidation proved elusive
as long as the researchers used organic media.
Only in 1889, after the Russian microbiologist Sergei Nikolaevich Winogradsky
(1856–1953) used an inorganic substrate (ammonium chloride, NH 4 Cl), were the
two nitrifiers—Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter—finally isolated in a pure culture
(fig. 1.7).60 Substrate-specific bacteria of the first genus derive their energy by oxidiz-
ing ammonia to nitrite, and the other specialized microbes complete the process by
converting nitrite to nitrate. Obviously aerobic while metabolizing, both nitrifiers
can survive long periods in anaerobic environments.
Return of the element from nitrate to its huge atmospheric reservoir as a simple
dinitrogen molecule was explained shortly before Hellriegel’s presentation. In 1885
Ulysse Gayon (1845–1929) and his assistants finally isolated pure cultures of two
bacteria that could reduce nitrates, and they named the process denitrification.61 This
stepwise process first reduces nitrates to nitrites; NO and N 2 O may be the subsequent
intermediate products, and N 2 is its final product. Unlike nitrification, which is domi-
nated by just two bacterial genera, denitrification is carried out by a variety of micro-
organisms able to use the oxygen in nitrates for their respiration as they feed on many
organic substrates. Pseudomonas, Bacillus, and Alcaligenes are the most common
denitrifying genera.62
Gayon’s fundamental discovery literally closed the biospheric nitrogen cycle. Since
that time we have not discovered any other major flows in nitrogen’s agricultural
cycle—but our research has provided enormous amounts of detailed information
concerning every important reservoir of the nutrient and its intricate transfers among
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 17

Figure 1.7
Sergei Nikolaevich Winogradsky (1856–1953). From the author’s collection.

the atmosphere, plants, soils, and waters.63 But major uncertainties remain: while
our qualitative understanding is rather satisfactory, we are still unable to quantify
reliably all but one of the element’s large biospheric reservoirs (we know accurately
its total atmospheric presence made up overwhelmingly of N 2 ), and we have to use
rather wide ranges when estimating the element’s biospheric flows. Figure 1.8 shows
all important reservoirs and flows of the biospheric nitrogen cycle centered on ag-
ricultural crops.
The atmosphere is nitrogen’s largest biospheric reservoir, containing some 3.9 ⫻
10 15 t of the gas. Stable N 2 molecules dominate, forming 78% of atmospheric vol-
ume. Highly variable concentrations of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide
(NO 2 ), often designated jointly as NO x , nitrous oxide (N 2 O), nitrates (NO 3⫺),
18
HUMAN ACTIVITY Chapter 1

fossil fertilizers food, fiber, organic

fuels wood wastes

NO2 N2 NH3 , NH4+

ATMOSPHERE

NO

-
NO3 N2 O

plants

diazotrophs

- - soil organic
SOIL

NO3 NO2 NH3 , NH+4

matter

fixed NH4+

- organic +
NO3 matter NH4
WATERS

sediments

Figure 1.8
Nitrogen cycle centered on crops.
 Nitrogen in Agriculture 19

ammonia (NH 3 ), and ammonium (NH 4⫹) are measured merely in parts per billion
(ppb) or parts per trillion (ppt). Nitrogen content of soils varies widely, ranging from
less than 1,000 kg N/ha in the poorest glacial soils to well over 10,000 kg N/ha in
excellent chernozems. But the organic nitrogen, stored in long- and short-lived hu-
mus, almost always dominates.64 The hydrosphere stores very little nitrogen: nitrate
concentrations in uncontaminated streams (ammonia is much less soluble) were very
low (below 0.1 mg NO 3-N/L), and even today clean rivers generally carry less than
1 mg/L.65 Because most of the plant tissues are composed of nitrogen-poor polymers,
nitrogen stored in crops adds up to a minuscule reservoir of the nutrient compared
to the element’s store in soils.66
Fixation, nitrification, and denitrification are the basic flows of the cycle. Biofixa-
tion moves nitrogen from the atmosphere’s enormous N 2 stores to NH 3 ; it is per-
formed by symbiotic and free-living diazotrophs (nitrogen-fixing bacteria), which
can sever dinitrogen’s strong molecular bond at atmospheric pressure and at ambient
temperature thanks to nitrogenase, a specialized enzyme no other organisms carry.67
Rhizobium is by far the most important symbiotic diazotroph forming nodules on
leguminous roots. Symbiosis between Azolla pinnata, a small, floating, freshwater
fern common in tropical Asia, and Anabaena azollae, an N-fixing cyanobacterium
living in a cavity of the fern’s leaflet, is important in Asian wet fields.68 A recent
discovery of endophytic diazotrophs (Acetobacter, Herbaspirillum) living inside sug-
arcane roots, stems, and leaves explains high yields of unfertilized crops after years
of consecutive cultivation: these endophytes fix at least 50 kg N/ha.69
Among free-living fixers, only cyanobacteria can add substantial amounts of nitro-
gen to cultivated soils: Anabaena, Nostoc, and Calothrix are by far the most impor-
tant genera, enriching soils by as much as 20–30 kg N/ha a year.70 They fix nitrogen
in special heterocysts formed at regular intervals along their filaments. Oscillatoria
and Plectonema, common anaerobic fixers, need no heterocysts. Fixation by other
free-living bacteria adds much less nitrogen: reported values for such common spe-
cies as Azotobacter and Clostridium are typically less than 0.5 kg N/ha, and the
shortage of available organic soil carbon is often the most important factor limiting
their growth.71 Lightning severs nitrogen’s triple bond thanks to the high pressures
and high temperature of electrical discharges, and the element then forms NO and
NO 2 . After atmospheric oxidation most of this fixed nitrogen is deposited as NO 3 .
Nitrifying bacteria present in soils and waters transform NH 3 to NO 3⫺, a more
soluble compound plants prefer to assimilate. Assimilated nitrogen is embedded
mostly in amino acids that form plant proteins. Heterotrophs (animals and people)
20 Chapter 1

are incapable to synthesize de novo a number of amino acids needed to form their
body proteins, and they must ingest them in feed and food.72 Food proteins are re-
quired to supply ten of these essential amino acids in children and nine in adults.73
Naturally, relative protein requirements (g/kg of body mass) are highest during in-
fancy when rapid growth requires plenty of essential amino acids to synthesize new
tissues; at that time breakdown rates of proteins will be also high.74 Ingested nitrogen
also becomes a part of nucleic acids and neurotransmitters.75
After plants and heterotrophs die, enzymatic decomposition (ammonification)
moves nitrogen incorporated in their tissues to NH 3 , which, much like the newly
fixed nitrogen, is oxidized by bacterial nitrifiers. Denitrification returns the element
from NO3⫺ via NO 2⫺ to the atmospheric N 2 . There are considerable leakages, de-
tours, and backtrackings along this main cyclical route. Volatilization of ammonia
from soils, plant tissues, and animal and human urine and feces (representing a large
part of the ingested nitrogen) links plants, soils, and waters with the atmosphere.
After a rather short atmospheric residence time ammonia is deposited, in dry form
or in precipitation, on plants, soils, and waters.76
Both nitrification and denitrification release NO x (mostly NO) and N 2 O from
soils. Nitrogen in NO x returns to the ground in atmospheric deposition, mostly after
oxidation to NO 3 .77 In contrast, N 2 O is basically inert in the troposphere, but it is
a powerful greenhouse gas, absorbing the outgoing long-wave radiation.78 The high
solubility of nitrates means that the compounds leak readily into ground and surface
waters, and both organic and inorganic nitrogen in soils can be moved to waters by
soil erosion.
Armed with this understanding we can now focus on the ways in which traditional
agricultures managed their nitrogen flows. As we can make some fairly reliable esti-
mates for older practices (for which we have few, or no, contemporary quantitative
details), and as there is some surprisingly detailed information about more recent
ways of preindustrial agronomic management, it is possible to go beyond qualitative
descriptions and to make revealing quantitative reconstructions of nitrogen supplies,
removals, and limits in traditional agricultures.
2
Traditional Sources of Nitrogen
Preindustrial Agricultures

The two notable achievements of nineteenth century science whose history was
traced in the preceding chapter—understanding of nutrient needs in agriculture, and
the discovery of principal nitrogen pathways in the element’s grand biospheric cy-
cle—validated a number of traditional agronomic practices and showed the direction
cropping has to take in order to increase future harvests. Higher crop yields were
impossible without higher nitrogen inputs, and agricultural advances could be seen
as a continuous quest for higher nutrient supply.
Shifting farmers, the earliest agriculturalists, took no direct steps in order to re-
plenish nutrient supplies: they alternated short periods of crop cultivation with long
spans of forest or woodland regrowth, which conserved and restored soil nitrogen.
Sedentary agricultures were engaged in progressively intensifying recycling of various
kinds of organic wastes ranging from crop residues and animal manures to canal
mud and human excrements.
But their most remarkable way of providing additional nitrogen was a nearly uni-
versal and highly effective practice of cultivating leguminous species, be it in rota-
tions with cereal or root staples or in the form of intercropping. Interestingly, as we
have already seen, the efficacy of this ancient practice was just about the last major
puzzle to be explained by the scientific quest for an understanding of the nitrogen
cycle.
More than 3/4 of all nitrogen available for crop growth in the most productive tra-
ditional agricultures came from managed inputs, and their output was sufficient to
feed, albeit on largely vegetarian diets, more than 10 people per hectare of arable land
in places where continuous cultivation was possible. Densities of about 5 people/ha
were achievable as averages even for large regions or countries in less hospitable
climates. These impressive achievements marked the limits of traditional farming: to
go beyond them, intensifying agricultures had to find new sources of nitrogen.
22 Chapter 2

Recycling of Organic Matter

Shifting farmers—the earliest practitioners of the least intensive form of agricul-

ture—did not engage in any active recycling of organic matter. Their cropping se-
quences began with the removal of natural phytomass, a task accomplished by a
combination of slashing and burning in forests, or with setting of grassland fires.
Depending on the fire’s intensity, a large share, or nearly all, of the nitrogen in the
original vegetation was lost as NO x during the combustion, as was a great deal of
nitrogen from the surface soil layer. But mineral nutrients liberated by the fire helped
to produce a few acceptable harvests.1
Subsequent lengthy regeneration—lasting for up to 25–30 years, and getting
shorter where higher population densities reduced the availability of land—helped
to raise, if not fully restore, nitrogen level in soils protected by renewed plant cover
from erosion and from rapid decomposition of organic matter. Although shifting
cultivation could support population densities between 0.1 and 0.6 people/ha—an
order of magnitude higher than even the relatively most affluent hunting and gather-
ing societies—sedentary cropping could eventually feed ten times as many people
from the same area of continuously farmed land.2
In contrast to shifting farming, no permanent traditional agriculture could do
without the recycling of organic matter. Decomposition and mineralization proceed
faster in soils exposed by plowing and concentrations of organic matter, the principal
reservoir of naturally accumulated nitrogen, begin falling rapidly with continued
cropping (fig. 2.1).3 Recycling of organic wastes is thus essential to replenish these
nitrogen stores. During the second century b.c. Marcus Cato advised farmers to
‘‘spread pigeon dung on meadow, garden and field crops. Save carefully goat, sheep,
cattle, and all other dung. . . . You may make compost of straw, lupines, chaff, bean
stalks, husks, and ilex and oak leaves.’’ 4
Sung Ying-hsing, writing in 1637 during the last years of the Ming dynasty, listed
the fertilizers suitable for rice and even provided an interesting quantitative estimate
of the nutritional benefit of unusual soybean recycling:
human and animal excretions, dry cakes and pressed seeds (. . . of these sesame and turnip
seed cakes are best . . .), grass and tree leaves. . . . When the price of beans is low, soy beans
can be cast into the field, each bean enriching an area of about three inches square; the cost
is later twice repaid by the grain yield.5
Recycling was particularly important in areas with adequate precipitation or in
regions where irrigation either removed or at least alleviated the recurrent threat of
 Traditional Sources of Nitrogen 23

6
cropping begins

5 temperate crop rotations,

climate residue management
Soil organic matter content (%)

4
continuous grain
crops
3

tropical crop rotations

2
climate

continuous grain
1 crops

0
-2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Years

Figure 2.1
Declines of soil organic matter with crop cultivation.

water shortages, which would have been otherwise the most important yield-limiting
factor—but its impact was always restricted by competing uses for crop residue as
well as by commonly inefficient means of recycling both plant and animal and human
wastes.
The return of crop residues was the most obvious option to slow down the extrac-
tion of soil nitrogen. In every Old World society in which cereals were the dominant
staple, their straws were the largest source of recyclable nitrogen. Although the nitro-
gen content is fairly low—cereal straws have between 0.4 and 0.9% N, with 0.6%
N a common average, and leguminous straws have 0.8–1.4% N (appendix B) 6 —
their output was relatively large. In contrast to modern short-stalked varieties the
traditional cultivars yielded much more straw than grain (straw/grain ratios for sta-
ple grains ranged mostly between 2 and 3).7
The simplest way of recycling crop residues is to burn cereal stubble, crop stalks,
or vines in the field, a practice still common in all traditional agricultures.8 As with
the burning of original vegetation by shifting farmers, this combustion of crop resi-
dues in harvested fields returns all mineral nutrients to the soil in the remaining ash,
24 Chapter 2

but it releases from about half (in smoldering, inefficient fires) to more than 9/10 (in
rapid burns) of all nitrogen as NO x to the atmosphere. Plowing in stubble and any
other residues not needed for other uses is always a much more efficient way of
nitrogen recycling—but it may actually result in temporary decline of soil nitrogen
available to plants.
This is because the C/N ratios of crop residues are commonly above 50, and as
high as 150 (only leguminous residues having C/N ratios below 40), much higher
than those of fresh leafy phytomass or animal manures.9 Biomass with C/N ratios
below 20 will decompose fairly rapidly, making its nitrogen available for plant
growth. In contrast, the decomposers trying to mineralize high C/N residues will
require nitrogen from the soil to synthesize their own tissues, temporarily immobiliz-
ing the nutrient during the early stages of decay, and hence reducing the short-term
productivity of the soil.10 Most of the immobilized nitrogen will become available
weeks or months later after the death of microorganisms that decomposed the residues.
The amount of nitrogen directly recycled in crop residues was relatively small.
Recycling only low stubble and roots from a medieval European wheat or barley
crop yielding often only 500 kg/ha would have returned as little as 2 kg N/ha, or
just 10% of the crop’s nitrogen needs. Burning all straw from a good harvest of
traditional Southeast Asian rice would have returned, with low-temperature smol-
dering fire preserving about 2/5 of all nitrogen, about 10 kg N/ha, no more than 1/5
of the nutrient assimilated by the crop.11
But direct recycling of crop residues was frequently very limited because it was
either impossible or impractical to plow most of this waste phytomass back into
soils: impractical because the long-stemmed residues would have to be chopped up
first before being incorporated into soils,12 impossible because the residues had a
number of competing uses. Cereal and leguminous straws, corn and sorghum stover,
stalks and vines of oil and tuber crops were an important source of household fuel—
and they still are, particularly in deforested and densely populated alluvial regions
of Asia as well as in arid countries of Africa (fig. 2.2).13 Their use as building material
(mostly as straw mixed with clay and for roof thatching) was also very common.
Crop residues have also provided indispensable feed (sometimes from stubble graz-
ing, mostly as stall-fed roughage) and bedding for domestic animals, especially for
ruminants whose nutrition requires a minimum share of roughage in order to main-
tain normal rumen activity.14 Cereal straws and a few other residues (cotton waste,
banana leaves) are also an excellent substrate for cultivation of white button and
straw mushrooms,15 and in some societies residues have been used for making paper.
 Traditional Sources of Nitrogen 25

Figure 2.2
Chinese rice straw dried for feed, fuel, and animal bedding. Photo by V. Smil.

Farmyard Manures

Nitrogen in residues used for feed and bedding was generally recycled as a part of
animal manures. The difficulties of quantifying actual rates of nitrogen recycled in
manures are due to the high variability of waste output, great fluctuations in its
nitrogen content, and often very large nitrogen losses both before and after the appli-
cation. Manure production and its nitrogen content depend on breed, sex, age,
health, feeding, and water intake of animals, as well as on the quality and quantity
of bedding materials.
Waste output per head can be estimated either as the share of the nutrient con-
sumed by livestock or as a share of animal’s live weight. However, variations of
26 Chapter 2

body mass—mostly due to the adequacy and quality of feed, prevalence of diseases,
and intensity of field work—make it difficult to estimate typical averages.16 Propor-
tions of ingested nitrogen excreted in dung and urine range from 75 to 85% for
dairy cattle and 65 to 75% for pigs.
Typical daily rates of waste generation in traditional agriculture equaled almost
4% of an animal’s live weight for sheep and goats, 5% for pigs, horses, and camels,
6% for poultry, and as much as 9% for dairy cattle. Choosing the most likely means
of nitrogen content of animal wastes is even more difficult. Feces rarely have more
than 0.75% N, and urine’s nitrogen content ranges between 0.6 and 1.4% N. The
element’s presence in fresh organic wastes is below 1% for all but poultry excreta,
but it is highly variable (appendix D).
Measured nitrogen contents for dairy, pig, and poultry manures have two- to
threefold ranges, and even greater differences have been found for beef manures.17
Given the poorer diets of animals in traditional agricultures, it would be sensible to
assume that the nitrogen content of their wastes was near the lower range of modern
rates, or about 0.5% N for cattle and pig wastes and 1.2% N for poultry excrements.
Any wastes produced by animals grazing on permanent pastures will be unavailable
for recycling to cropland. Animals grazing on cropland pastures, harvested fields,
or cover crops in tree plantations would deposit their wastes directly on the culti-
vated land. Only manure produced in confinement could be economically gathered
and distributed to nearby fields. Shares of animals raised in confinement ranged from
100% for many European draft animals to a tiny fraction of Asia’s sheep.
Cleaning the stalls and sties, moving the wastes to temporary storages for fermen-
tation or time-consuming composting of mixed wastes, and eventual transportation
of liquid or solid manures to fields and their spreading on the cropland required a
great deal of unappealing and heavy labor.18 Because of the low nitrogen content of
most manures and composts (between 0.4 and 0.6% N), massive applications were
required if the recycled wastes were to provide a significant share of a crop’s nitrogen
needs. Most of the labor was actually spent on moving water: it makes up about
65–80% of manures.
Manuring is attested by some of the oldest written sources of antiquity. Odysseus
returning to Ithaca found his dog Argus ‘‘lying neglected on the heaps of mule and
cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw
it away to manure the great close.’’ 19 Manuring was essential in Roman farming,
but because of the limited amount of good pastures and generally low quality of
feed, cow manure, the single largest type of animal waste, was considered unimpor-
 Traditional Sources of Nitrogen 27

tant, ranking below ass, sheep, and goat wastes. Poultry manure was deservedly seen
to be the most valuable organic waste.20 At the very beginning of the common era
Lucius Junius Columella, whose estate was near Gades (Cadiz) in southern Spain,
advised readers to apply between 18 and 24 manure loads (vehes) per iugerum,
equivalent to about 14–18 t/ha.21
Manuring eventually reached the highest intensity in Western Europe and in parts
of East Asia. In China annual field applications of composted manures commonly
surpassed 10 t/ha, with small farms in the southwest averaging almost 30 t/ha.22
Typical rates in prerevolutionary France were around 20 t/ha; two centuries later
the recommended applications in Iowa’s corn fields were almost identical.23
Volatilization and leaching cause considerable losses both during often lengthy
storage—European manures were recycled only after several years of storage in
mostly unprotected manure heaps24 —and after field spreading, especially when the
manures were applied during the fall and winter and on bare, sloping land.25 These
losses reduced the original nitrogen content by at least half, and they would often
reach two-thirds, or even more than four-fifths, of the initially voided nitrogen.26
Nitrogen from recycled manures actually available to crops could thus amount to
no more than the nutrient in atmospheric deposition (just a few kg N/ha)—or it
could be the single largest nitrogen input in traditional cropping, providing well over
50 kg N/ha a year.
Nitrogen content of human wastes also varies considerably with the quality of
average diets, but appreciable amounts of the nutrient were returned to soils in fer-
mented urine and excrements in many traditional societies that did not proscribe
handling of these wastes: after all, adults excrete 75–90% of the nitrogen’s daily
intake in urine. Slightly conservative age-weighted assumptions would be an average
daily output of 150 g of feces and 1.2 L of urine. With respective dry matter contents
of 25% and 4%, and dry matter’s nitrogen shares at 5% and 15%, typical annual
output would be about 3.3 kg N/capita.27
In traditional Chinese farming 70–80% of all human waste were recycled; huge
volumes of night soil were brought from cities and towns, creating a large waste-
handling and transportation industry (fig. 2.3).28 A similar system had evolved after
1650 in Japan: starting around 1649 authorities in Edo (present-day Tokyo) ordered
all toilets directly discharging into rivers and moats to be torn down, and by 1656
farmers began hauling off the waste as fertilizer.29 Western observers commonly
commented on the ubiquity and intensity of Chinese and Japanese night-soil recy-
cling.30 But, as with manure nitrogen, there were considerable volatilization losses
28 Chapter 2

Figure 2.3
Collection of night soil in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, in the early 1980s. Only the instal-
lation of sewers and modern water-treatment plants has done away with this ancient practice.
Photo by V. Smil.

during storage, collection, and application. Only in densely settled communities

practicing assiduous recycling could the contributions of human wastes surpass
20 kg N/ha.
A huge variety of other recycled organic wastes contained materials with both
very high and very low nitrogen content. Cakes remaining after pressing oil from
various seeds could have up to 7% N, while canal, pond, and river mud traditionally
spread on fields throughout South China had no more than 0.1–0.3% of the nutrient
(appendix B). Market and kitchen wastes, made up mostly of plant remains, were
not particularly high in nitrogen, but as they were often available in large quantities
they became important ingredients of composts: Zola’s exuberant description of
their recycling is perhaps the most memorable vignette of organic farming.31

Cultivation of Legumes

Of course, recycling of crop residues represented no net additions of nitrogen to the

agroecosystems in question, and recycling of animal and human wastes brought net
 Traditional Sources of Nitrogen 29

nitrogen supply only to the small extent to which the nitrogen in feed and food came
from sources outside the cultivated fields (that is, largely from grazing on permanent
pastures, canal banks, or roadsides, from hunting and gathering, and from fishing
and aquaculture).
The only means to provide an additional supply of nitrogen in traditional agricul-
tures was to boost the rate of natural biofixation beyond the rate resulting from
the presence of leguminous weeds and free-living diazotrophs, that is, through the
cultivation of leguminous plants. That otherwise highly disparate cultures on four
continents have independently discovered varieties of this effective approach is one
of the best examples of evolutionary convergence.
Nor did these discoveries come only after millennia of agricultural experience:
benefits of leguminous grains were known since the very beginning of cropping.
Archaeological finds place peas and lentils with barley and wheat in the earliest set-
tled agricultures of the Middle East (as early as 10,000 b.c.); by 7000–6000 b.c.
both species, together with different vetches, were very common in sites ranging
from Jericho to southern Turkey.32
Because pulses ripen in the Near East earlier than wild cereals—in late winter and
early spring, at the time when hunting societies faced the worst meat shortages—
and because their patchy distribution might have eased possible territorial conflicts,
legumes might have been actually the earliest domesticated plants.33 Textual evidence
documents beans, broad beans, lentils, chickpeas, and vetch in Egypt’s Old Kingdom,
and biblical references include Jacob’s proverbial pottage of lentils.34
The pattern of leguminous cultivation is remarkable for the fascinating regional
differences as individual agricultures combined a variety of legumes with cereal (or
tuber) staples. In traditional Chinese farming soybeans, beans, peas, and peanuts
were rotated with millets, wheat, and rice (fig. 2.4).35 Indian legume cultivation has

JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC

CORN OR MILLET WHEAT OR BARLEY

SOYBEANS OR SWEET POTATOES WHEAT, BARLEY OR PEAS

COTTON WHEAT OR BARLEY

BROAD BEANS OR GREEN MANURES COTTON OR CORN RAPESEEDS, PEAS

Figure 2.4
An example of a traditional crop rotation from South China including the cultivation of
legumes.
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springing up from seeds carried by birds. Veritable thickets soon take
possession. Here is where the sassafras oil supply comes from.
Contractors often clear the old fields and make them ready for tillage,
taking the roots for pay.
The wood weighs 31.42 pounds per cubic foot; is very durable when
exposed to dampness; is slightly aromatic; inclined to check in drying;
the layers of annual growth are marked by rings of large pores;
summerwood is quite distinct from the earlier growth; medullary rays
are many and thin; color dull orange-brown, the thin sapwood light
yellow.
Sassafras goes to sawmills in all regions where it is large enough for
lumber, but the total cut is small. Reports from sawmills in 1909
credited this species with only 25,000 feet in the United States, and it
was still less in 1910. It is evident that this is only a small portion of
the total output, and probably Tennessee alone produces that much.
The wood is sold with other species and loses its name, frequently
passing as ash. The wood bears considerable resemblance to ash, in
grain and color, but is lighter in weight, and much lower in strength.
Sassafras was one of the canoe woods of early times along the lower
Mississippi and its tributaries. Its two principal advantages over most
woods with which it was associated was its light weight and lasting
qualities. Canoes of this timber in Louisiana have given continued
service for a third of a century.
In all parts of its range, wherever it is of sufficient size, it has been
used for posts. It is generally considered good for about twenty years.
Large trunks were formerly split for rails, and a few are utilized in that
way still, but most timber large enough for rails, now goes to
sawmills. In Texas most of the sassafras supplied by sawmills is
manufactured into furniture, but is listed as ash. The same thing is
done in Arkansas and Missouri, but the use in the latter state is
extended to interior house finish and office and bank fixtures.
Sometimes it is made the outside wood, and the figure caused by
sawing the logs tangentially is accentuated by stains and fillers. The
figure of quarter-sawed wood is not attractive because the medullary
rays are too small. It lasts well as railroad ties and a few are found in
service in many parts of the tree’s range, but those who see it in the
track are liable to mistake it for chestnut.
A by-product of sassafras deserves mention—tea made from the
flowers or from the bark of the roots. It is relished in the early spring,
and is popular in most regions where the tree is known. The bark is a
commercial commodity. It is tied in small bundles, and the price at
retail ranges from a nickel to a dime each. Drug stores and grocers
sell it. In the city of Washington in early spring sassafras peddlers
canvas the city from center to circumference. They are generally
negro men and women who dig the roots on the neighboring hills of
Virginia and Maryland, strip the bark, tie it in small bundles, and by
diligence and perseverance, succeed in converting the merchandise
into money.
Sassafras is often cited as an example of a tree with leaves of
different forms. Three shapes are common, and all frequently occur
on the same tree, and even on the same twig. One has no lobes,
another has one lobe like the thumb of a mitten, and another has
three.
Lancewood (Ocotea catesbyana) is a small evergreen tree, looks much
like laurel, and grows in southern Florida, on the islands and on the
mainland in the vicinity of Biscayne bay. It is closely related to
sassafras, and the bark has an aromatic odor. It belongs to a group of
trees with nearly 200 species scattered in hot regions of both
hemispheres. This is the only one belonging to the United States, and
it appears to be a newcomer on these shores, from the fact that it has
succeeded in obtaining so limited a foothold. It keeps well south of
the region where it is likely to be frosted and it seldom exceeds a
height of thirty feet and a diameter of eighteen inches. The fruit
ripens in autumn and is dark blue with flesh thin and dry. The wood is
hard, heavy, strong, checks badly in drying, and has a rich brown
color, the sapwood being yellow. Rings of annual growth are marked
with many small, regularly-distributed open ducts; medullary rays are
thin and numerous; wood weighs 47.94 pounds per cubic foot;
durable in contact with the soil, beautifully colored, and is highly
prized for small cabinet work and novelties. At Miami, Florida, small
trunks cut on neighboring hummocks, or brought from the keys, are
worked into souvenirs to be sold to visitors. Lancewood fishing rods
are among the strongest and most expensive on the market; but little
of the material of which they are made grows in Florida. It is also
manufactured into billiard cues and small handles.
MADRONA

Madrona
 MADRONA
(Arbutus Menziesii)

adrona is an interesting tree which ranges from British

M Columbia southward to central California, attaining its greatest

development in the redwood forests of northern California,
where trees are sometimes one hundred feet high and six or
seven feet in diameter. It is not only an interesting tree itself,
but it has many interesting relatives, some of which are trees, others
shrubs, and still others only small plants or vines. It may be called a
second cousin to the common huckleberry, the mountain laurel,
trailing arbutus, the azaleas, the tiny wintergreen, and the great
rhododendron. It has some poor relations, but many that are highly
respectable. It belongs to the heath family, of which there are seventy
genera, and more than a thousand species; but less than half of them
are in America, the others being scattered widely over the world.
The madrona, when at its best, is one of the largest members of the
family; but it is not always at its best. It sometimes degenerates into
a sprawling shrub, where it grows on poor ground and on cold, dry
mountain tops. It is manifestly not fair to study any tree at its worst,
and it is particularly not fair to the madrona, which varies so greatly in
its appearance. At one place it may be scarcely large enough to shade
the lair of a jackrabbit, and at another it spreads its branches wide
enough to shade an army—a small army, however, say, about two
thousand men. A tree of that size may be found within a few hours’
ride of San Francisco. Its branches cover an area of from eight
thousand to ten thousand square feet.
When madrona grows in the open it throws out wide limbs like a
southern live oak, though not so large or long. Its crown is rounded
and graceful; but when it grows in forests, where other trees crowd it,
the trunk rises straight up to lift the crown into the sunlight and fresh
air. The madrona is seen in all its glory in northwestern California,
where it catches some of the warmth and the moist air from the
Pacific. It follows the ranges of the Siskiyou mountains eastward near
the boundary of California and Oregon. It is usually mixed with other
forest trees, but sometimes large stands nearly pure are encountered,
and there the long trunks, rather gray near the ground, but wine-
colored above, rise in imposing beauty and are lost in the evergreen
crowns.
The leaves suggest those of laurel, but are broader. The large clusters
of white flowers are among the glories of the vegetable kingdom.
George B. Sudworth, dendrologist of the United States Forest Service,
who usually describes in strictly prosaic terms, breaks away from that
habit long enough to compare madrona flowers to lilies of the valley,
in his “Forest Trees of the Pacific Slope.” The flowers appear from
March to May, depending on latitude and elevation.
The brilliant orange-red fruit ripens in the fall, and is often borne in
great abundance. It renders the crowns of the trees very beautiful.
The fruit is about half an inch long and contains many small angular
seeds. The fruit is said to contain a substance which puts to sleep wild
creatures that feed on it. The claim is probably mythical, for birds
breakfast extravagantly on it in the morning, and apparently do not do
any sleeping until after sunset.
This tree was discovered by and named for Archibald Menzies, a
Scotch botanist who traveled in the Northwest more than a hundred
years ago. It has several local names, among them being madrove,
laurel wood, madrone-tree, laurel, and manzanita. The last is the
proper name of another small tree which is associated with madrona
and is closely related to it.
The wood weighs 43.95 pounds per cubic foot. It is a little below
eastern white oak in fuel value, a little above it in strength, and
somewhat under it in stiffness. The color is pale reddish-brown,
resembling applewood in tone, but generally not quite so dark. The
wood is porous, but the pores are very small. Medullary rays are
numerous but thin. On account of the rays being of a little deeper red
than the other wood, quarter-sawed stock is handsome and of
somewhat peculiar appearance. The figure is much like quarter-sawed
beech, but of deeper, more handsome color. The contrast between
springwood and summerwood is not strong, though easily seen.
Generally, the summerwood constitutes about one-fourth of the
annual ring. The tree grows slowly, but with much irregularity. The
increase in one season may be four or five times as great as in
another. The bark exfoliates, and is quite thin.
Madrona has never been put to much use. Difficulties in seasoning it
have stood in the way. The wood warps and checks. Similar difficulties
with other woods have been overcome, and such troubles should not
be unduly discouraging. The beauty of the wood is unquestioned. It
presents a fine appearance when worked into furniture, particularly in
small panels and turned work, like spindles, knobs, and small posts.
When made into grills it shows a surprising richness of tone. The
wood polishes almost to the smoothness of holly. Small quantities are
made into flooring; a little goes to the furniture makers; lathes turn
some of it for novelties and souvenirs; fuel cutters sell it as cordwood;
and tanbark peelers cut the trees for the thin, papery bark. In that
case the trunks are left to decay, unless they happen to be convenient
to a cordwood market.
One of the most extensive uses for the wood of madrona is for
charcoal burning. Blacksmiths buy it because it is cheaper than coal,
and some is used in shops where soldering and welding are done; but
the most exacting demand comes from gunpowder manufacturers.
They find this wood almost equal to alder and willow as a source of
charcoal suitable for powder.
Mexican Madrona (Arbutus xalapensis) might properly be called Texas
madrona as it occurs in that state and probably in no other, but its
range extends southward into Mexico. It produces a poorly shaped
trunk seldom much more than twenty feet high and one foot in
diameter, and usually divided into several branches near the ground.
It blooms in March and ripens its fruit in midsummer. The tree is
found on dry limestone hills, and in the valley of the Rio Blanco, and
among the Eagle mountains. Cabinet makers in Texas put the wood to
rather exacting uses after they have carefully seasoned it to overcome
its natural tendency to check. It is very hard; its color is a little lighter
than applewood which it resembles; annual rings are scarcely visible,
so regular and even is the year’s growth. In Texas the wood is made
into plane stocks, tool handles, and mathematical instruments.
Arizona Madrona (Arbutus arizonica) has a restricted range on the
Santa Catalina and Santa Rita mountains of southern Arizona, where it
ascends to an altitude of 8,000 feet. The species extends southward
into Mexico. The largest trees attain a height of fifty feet and a
diameter of two. Trunks are usually straight and shapely, and show
the thin, red bark common to the genus. The wood resembles that of
the species in Texas, and doubtless is suited to the same purposes,
but no utilization of it has been reported, except for fuel, and for
fences and sheds on mountain ranches. When the region becomes
more thickly settled, the value of the wood will be appreciated.
Manzanita (Arctostaphylos manzanita) is not generally welcomed by botanists into
the tree class. They say it is too small; but it is as large as some of the laurels which
go as trees without question, and is shaped much like them. There are several
species of manzanita. The word is Spanish and means “little apple.” The name is
natural, for one of the most noticeable things about manzanita is the fruit, the size
of well-grown huckleberries. It is shaped like an apple, and its tart taste suggests
that fruit. The Digger Indians along the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in
California gather the berries by the sack, dry them, and keep them for winter—if
they can. It is often impossible to keep them because, like other fruit, they are apt
to become wormy. When the Indians discover them in that condition they display
rare thrift and economy for savages, by soaking the fruit and pressing out the juice,
which is said to pass for a pretty fair quality of cider, but it must be quickly
consumed or it will mother and change to vinegar. Indians now put the berries to
use less frequently than in early times when they were nearly always hungry.
Manzanita is of the same family as madrona. Its range extends along the mountains
of the Pacific coast ranges from Oregon to Mexico, and inland to Utah. The largest
trees are about twenty feet high and a foot or less in diameter; very much divided
and branched, with limbs crooked in more ways, perhaps, than those of any other
representative of the vegetable kingdom. Thousands of canes are cut from the
branches, and if any living man ever saw a straight one he failed to report it.
Manzanita grows in almost impenetrable thickets on dry slopes and ridges. Its thin
foliage casts so pale a shadow that the tree’s shade is little cooler than the boiling
sun upon the open naked ground and rocks. The bark is a reddish-chocolate color,
and exfoliates in scales of papery thinness. The heart is nearly of the same color as
the bark, but the sap is white and very thin. The wood is hard, strong, stiff, but
exceedingly brittle. If a branch is sharply bent it will fly into splinters.
The uses of the wood are numerous, but the total quantity demanded is moderate.
Novelty stores sell small articles to tourists in California, sometimes passing the
wood off as mountain mahogany which does not so much as belong to the same
family. The most common articles manufactured by novelty shops from manzanita
are canes, paper weights, paper knives, rulers, spoons, napkin rings, curtain rings,
cuff buttons, dominos, manicure sticks, jewel boxes, match safes, pin trays, and
photo frames.
COTTONWOOD

Cottonwood
 COTTONWOOD
[9]

(Populus Deltoides)

[9] The following species grow in the United States: Cottonwood (Populus
deltoides), Aspen (Populus tremuloides), Largetooth aspen (Populus
grandidentata), Swamp Cottonwood (Populus heterophylla), Balm of Gilead
(Populus balsamifera), Lanceleaf Cottonwood (Populus acuminata),
Narrowleaf Cottonwood (Populus angustifolia), Black Cottonwood (Populus
trichocarpa), Fremont Cottonwood (Populus fremontii), Mexican Cottonwood
(Populus mexicana), Texas Cottonwood (Populus wislizeni).

leven species of cottonwood are found in the United States, if all

E trees of the genus Populus are classed as cottonwoods. It is not

universally admitted, however, that they should be so classed.
The common cottonwood is the most widely known of all of
them, but it is recognized under different names in different
regions, viz.: Big cottonwood, yellow cottonwood, cotton tree,
Carolina poplar, necklace poplar, broadleaf poplar, and whitewood.
Its range covers practically all of the United States east of the Rocky
Mountains. It is rare or missing in eastern New England and southern
Florida, and most abundant in the Mississippi valley, and there the
largest trees are found. Some exceed 100 feet in height, and four in
diameter. Extreme sizes of 140 feet in height with diameters of from
seven to nine have been reported. The cottonwood was a frontier tree
on the western plains when settlers began to push into the region. It
grew as far west as any hardwood of the eastern forests, and was
found beyond meridian 100, which was supposed to be the boundary
between the region of rains and the semi-arid country. The
cottonwood clung to the river banks and to islands in the rivers, and
by that means escaped the Indian’s prairie and forest fires which he
kindled every year to improve the range for the buffalo. It is supposed
that most of the open country east of meridian 100 was originally
timbered, and that the Indians destroyed the forests by their long-
continued habit of burning the woods and prairies every year to
improve the pasture. Cottonwood was the longest survivor, because it
grew in damp places where fires did not burn fiercely. Black willow
was its most frequent companion on the western outposts of the
forests.
The cottonwood was fitted for holding its ground, and pushing
forward. Its light seeds are carried by millions on the wind and by
water. The tree bears large quantities of cotton (hence the name),
and when the wind whips it from the tree, seeds are caught among
the fibers and carried along, to be scattered miles away.
This tree was not much thought of by eastern people who had plenty
of other kinds of wood, but pioneers on the plains who had a hard
time to get any, found cottonwood useful. It made fences, corncribs,
stables, cabins, ox yokes, and fuel. The first canoes made by white
men on the upper Missouri river were of cottonwood. Lumber cut from
this tree is inclined to warp and check unless carefully handled, and
this prejudiced it in the eyes of many; but difficulties of that kind were
easily mastered, and instead of being a neglected wood it became
popular. Some of the largest early orders came from Germany. Vehicle
makers in this country employed it for wagon beds, as a substitute for
yellow poplar when that wood’s cost advanced. Manufacturers of
agricultural implements were pioneers in its use, it being excellent
material for hoppers, chutes, and boxes.
Cottonwood weighs 24.24 pounds per cubic foot, which is
approximately the weight of white pine. It has about the stiffness of
white oak, but only about eighty per cent of white oak’s strength, and
fifty per cent of its fuel value. The wood is very porous, but the pores
are small, usually invisible to the naked eye. The medullary rays are
small and obscure. The appearance of the wood is not improved by
quarter-sawing. The summerwood forms a thin, dark line, so faint that
the annual rings are often scarcely distinguishable. The tree is
generally a rapid grower; heartwood is brown, sapwood lighter, but as
a whole, this tree produces white wood.
The annual cut is declining. It was little more than half in 1910 what it
was in 1899. Some regions where large trees were once abundant
now have few. The sawmill output in 1910 for the United States—
including several species—was 220,000,000 feet. The veneer cut was
33,000,000 feet, log measure; the slack cooperage staves, chiefly for
flour barrels, numbered 44,000,000; and pulpwood amounted to
about 18,000,000 feet. The lumber cut was largest in the following
states in the order named: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri,
Tennessee, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Minnesota.
The tree was lumbered in forty-one states.
Cottonwood is a standard material in several lines of manufacturing. It
is made into nearly every kind of box that goes on the market, from
the cigar box to those in which pianos are shipped. Manufacturers of
food products are particularly anxious to procure this wood, and it is
one of the best for woodenware, such as dough boards, ironing
boards, and cloth boards. It is used by manufacturers of agricultural
implements, interior finish, bank and office fixtures, musical
instruments, furniture, vehicle tops, trunks, excelsior, saddle trees,
caskets and coffins, and numerous others.
There is no danger that cottonwood will disappear from this country,
but it will become scarce. It is being cut much faster than it is
growing, and is losing favor as a planted shade and park tree,
because of its habit of shedding cotton in the spring and its leaves in
the early autumn.
Swamp Cottonwood (Populus heterophylla) is known also as river
cottonwood, black cottonwood, downy poplar, and swamp poplar. Its
range describes a crude horseshoe, running from Rhode Island down
the Atlantic coast in a narrow strip, where it is neither abundant nor of
large size; touching northern Florida; running westward to eastern
Texas and thence up the Mississippi basin and the Ohio river to
southwestern Ohio. There is nothing handsome about its appearance
with its heavy limbs and sparse, rounded crown. In the eastern range
the average height is probably not more than fifty feet but in the
fertile Mississippi valley it reaches 100 and has a long merchantable
bole three feet in diameter. Its bark is rugged, dirty-brown and broken
into loose, conspicuous ridges. It is easily distinguished from the other
cottonwoods by the orange-colored pith in the twigs. The buds are
rounded and red and have a resinous odor. Sawmills and factories
never list this wood separately. It comes and goes as cottonwood. Its
uses are the same as those of common cottonwood. The two species
grow in mixture throughout the entire range of the swamp
cottonwood.
Texas Cottonwood (Populus wislizeni) is a rather large tree and is the
common cottonwood in the upper valley of the Rio Grande in New
Mexico and western Texas. The yellowish color of the twigs is apt to
attract attention. The wood is used about ranches and occasionally a
log finds its way to local sawmills; but its importance is limited to the
region where it grows.
Mexican Cottonwood (Populus mexicana) extends its range north of the
Mexican boundary into southern Arizona and southwestern New
Mexico. It is abundant in Mexico where the largest trees are eighty
feet high and three or four in diameter. It is smaller near the northern
limits of its range, and there it hugs the banks of mountain streams.
Stockmen use the trunks, which are usually small enough to be called
poles, to make fences and sheds.
Narrowleaf Cottonwood (Populus angustifolia)is a mountain species
which manages to live in the semi-arid regions from the Rocky
Mountains of Canada to Arizona, but is seldom found below an
elevation of 5,000 feet, and it ranges up to 10,000. Trunks are
eighteen inches or less in diameter, and fifty or sixty feet high. The
seeds are larger than those of most other cottonwoods. It being a
semi-desert species, its wood is appreciated where it is accessible,
and it has local uses only.
Lanceleaf Cottonwood (Populus acuminata) is a small tree with limited
range, growing in the arid region along the eastern base of the Rocky
Mountains, southward from the Black Hills. It is found also north of
the Canadian border. It is usually fifteen or eighteen inches in
diameter, and thirty or forty feet high. Trunks seldom go to sawmills,
but some local use is made of the wood. Trees are occasionally
planted for shade in towns of western Nebraska and Wyoming.
Fremont Cottonwood (Populus fremontii), called white cottonwood in
New Mexico, but elsewhere simply cottonwood, grows from western
Texas to California, and as far north as Utah and Colorado. It
sometimes attains a diameter of five or six feet and a height of 100.
The Indians in New Mexico formerly made rude, clumsy ox carts of
this wood, without a scrap of iron or other metal in the vehicles. One
of the carts is preserved in the National Museum, Washington, D. C.
The wood is tough and light, but it is dull white, with no attractive
figure. Even the annual rings are hardly distinguishable. Logs are
occasionally sawed into lumber, and farmers in western Texas make
wagon beds of it.
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