Feeding the Earth: Synthetic Fertilizers and the Remaking of Agriculture in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Project Duration: 01.06.2026 – 30.05.2030
Since the 19th century, the rise of modern high-input agricultural systems has driven a fundamental shift in the relationship between human societies and the biophysical environment. Among the various elements of the technological ‘package’ that made the global agricultural transformation possible—pesticides, mechanization, plant breeding, irrigation—none were more important than synthetic fertilizers. Synthetic fertilizers promised farmers a radical solution to the core challenge of maintaining soil fertility, effectively liberating humankind from age-old constraints on agricultural yields and human numbers. However, although they made farming more productive, they also made farmers dependent on external inputs, fueled the concentration of land ownership, and caused an array of environmental problems.
This project argues that synthetic fertilizers—along with the people and organizations that made their widespread use possible—constituted an equally important but hitherto neglected element of global agricultural transformation. Its aim is to understand how synthetic fertilizers have become such a central feature of modern agriculture. Rather than focusing on moments of ‘takeoff’, scientific discoveries, or the organization of production and trade, the project analyzes the diverse network of actors and drivers that drove the promotion, uptake and eventual mass appropriation of synthetic fertilizers by farmers in various parts of the world. After all, the spread of synthetic fertilizers depended not just on an increase in supply, but also on the creation of demand among millions of farmers who used them.
The project is divided into four subprojects, each analyzing a case study spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each case study presents a distinctive iteration of common issues, while together they enable us to draw broader conclusions about the global rise of synthetic fertilizers that no single regional study could provide.
The central aim of subproject 1 “Agricultural Knowledge and the Creation of Demand for Synthetic Fertilizers in Europe, c. 1830-1880” is to examine the developments that paved the way for the eventual large-scale adoption of new fertilization practices as little is known about how the farmers became sufficiently convinced by the utility of synthetic fertilizers to the point of adopting them en masse. Methodologically, the research will adopt a transnational approach by focusing on Switzerland, Great Britain and Germany, all of which shared basic similarities in the early use of fertilizers, intensive forms of agriculture, and early market orientation.
Subproject 2 “Chemical fertilizers, contestations and alternatives in South Africa, c. 1900 to 1990” examines the history of chemical fertilizers in South Africa and by tracing their use in the apartheid period (1948-1994), it offers crucial insights into the ways in which agricultural modernization was embedded in racial, class, and gendered politics. This project further investigates how fertilizers were promoted (and what kind), the ways in which knowledge about their usage was communicated, the controversies this generated, as well as the relations between the state, corporate players, and farmers in shaping fertilizer applications.
Subproject 3 “Agents of Trust: The Spread of Fertilizers in Turkey 1930s-1960s” asks how the use of chemical fertilizers emerged as a strategic issue in the 20th century, and how this is related to the question of building up trust between a farming population, international experts and the state. It will do this by focusing on three instances of the emergence of fertilizers in Turkey: I) trust building between foreign (mostly German) fertilizer producers and farmer communities (1920s and 1930s); II) the nationalization of chemical fertilizers and the strategic interests attached to them; III) the reappropriation of soil knowledge by farmers’ associations in the late 1960s.
Subproject 4 “Spreading Fertilizer Around the Phosphatvilles: Chemical Fertilizer and Moroccan Agriculture, 1920s-1970s” focuses on chemical fertilizer’s uneven embedding in the social, political and cultural worlds of Moroccan agriculture. It thereby contextualizes the history of phosphate mining, and Morocco’s global significance in input intensive food production, within the changing agrarian situation of Morocco itself, analyzing chemical fertilizer’s role in that change and farmers response to it. The project will approach this topic through the angles of brokers of synthetic fertilizer use, the politics of synthetic fertilizer through its position in imperial and national state agronomy policies, the racialized and gendered labor regimes of phosphate mining and agriculture, as well as a regional and transnational view, considering Morocco’s role as a driver of synthetic fertilizer use in West and North Africa.
