From National Geographic, May 2013, "Fertilized World: Song Linyuan, an elderly but spry farmer in a village northwest of Nanjing, recalls how he once kept his 1.3 acres of cropland as fertile as possible, composting household waste and spreading manure from his pigs and chickens. In all, his efforts added perhaps a hundred pounds of nitrogen per acre of land each year. He harvested 2,600 to 3,300 pounds of rice per acre.That’s a respectable harvest, a better yield than in many parts of the world. But now he gets more than twice that: 7,200 pounds per acre. It’s a harvest many farmers can only dream of.
The difference? “Better fertilizer,” he says. We’re sitting in a shop surrounded by farmers. Song’s answer provokes a loud discussion. Some agree that fertilizer was key; others say better seeds were more important. In reality the two technologies are intertwined. The high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat that breeders created in the 1950s and 1960s could reach their full potential only if they got more nitrogen.
The Chinese government made sure those crops were well fed. Between 1975 and 1995 it built hundreds of nitrogen factories, quadrupling the country’s manufacture of fertilizer and turning China into the world’s biggest producer. Song now spreads about five times as much nitrogen as before, saturating his fields with urea—a dry form of nitrogen—by casting handfuls of the snow-white granules across green shoots. This adds up to 530 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Farmers who grow vegetables use even more; some spread a ton of nitrogen, or even two, on each hectare (2.47 acres). Few of them think they’re doing anything harmful. “No, no pollution,” says Song, when asked about the environmental effects of fertilizer.
Here's a recent photo of the plant I worked at in Shuifu, Yunnan Province. This was a remote backwater when I was there and an entire peasant village was razed to build the plant. People lived in rammed-earth houses with mud floors, no windows, thatched roofs and a single bare electrical bulb hanging from the ceiling. "Butchers" would squat on the dirt roads and sell their fly-covered meat. Fertilizer came from the vast honey-pots where all the villagers did their business. There were no motorized boats on the Yangtze River...the barges were hauled up the river against the current by teams of men pulling tow-ropes. They didn't even have mules to pull the barges up the river. Our guest house for the foreign workers from Europe (mainly The Netherlands), Canada, and the US was over on the right side by the dam near that group of silos. There was nothing at all in the town or surrounding countryside. I cannot believe what 40 years of development and investment has done to the place.
