English Pastoral by James Rebanks (100 books to read .txt) 📕

‘guano’ to grow amazing crops. This dried seabird and bat muck, full of nutrients, had accumulated over centuries in South American caves and at the base of bird-nesting cliffs, and was used as a quick fix from the early years of the nineteenth century – but these ancient natural deposits were soon exhausted. Four generations ago we had been part of the global bat (and seagull) shit economy. But by the beginning of the twentieth century humanity was on a demographic knife-edge. It was believed that without new sources of fertilizer we were heading towards deep and long-lasting famines, as population growth was outstripping our ability to fertilize and grow the crops that were needed. Until, incredibly, a German chemist found the solution.

The dark-green fields we passed on the road carried his signature.

~

No one in my family knew who Fritz Haber was, but without him our lives would have been very different. He had solved the problem of field fertility when in 1909 he worked out how to artificially ‘fix’ atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen to make it usable for plants. Haber managed to make the impossible possible. He unpicked nature’s lock. He had, as he put it, produced ‘bread from air’. Haber’s colleague Carl Bosch found a way to apply this process industrially to make things to sell. The resulting ammonium nitrate fertilizer transformed agriculture – and society in general. Some estimates have put the number of humans that could be fed without Haber-Bosch farming techniques at 4 billion (which would mean, if true, that more than 3 billion humans today are only alive thanks to Haber and Bosch).

Haber won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for ‘improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind’. But his legacy was far from simple or benign. Ammonium nitrate was meant to help feed people – but it was first used as an explosive in the most murderous wars in human history. Haber’s other legacy was his contribution to the development of poisonous chlorine gas for use in the trenches of the First World War and the pesticide gas Zyklon-B, used later in Nazi death camps to kill millions of people.

~

From the end of the Second World War, Haber’s technological fix spread quickly across the world. Munitions factories in America switched from making explosives from ammonium nitrate to making agricultural fertilizer. American farmers, with access to the new fertilizers, quickly discovered that when their wheat or barley took nutrients from the soil, they simply added (by ‘top dressing’ or scattering on the topsoil) more artificial nutrients and planted the same crop again the next year. It was no longer necessary to use ‘circular’ nutrient systems, with a diversity of rotating crops and livestock, in order to maintain a healthy soil. These farmers were freed from having to create their own fertility within the farm and offered a miracle shop-bought solution. Haber’s nitrogen didn’t change all farming overnight – it would play out over decades – but this was the first profound break with the past from which so much else would flow.

In the post-war years, salesmen for the chemical and machinery corporations brought artificial fertilizer to rural communities around the world, including ours. They would come to our house for tea and cake, handing out glossy brochures with photos of amazing crops and blather on about all the things we needed to buy to keep up with our neighbours.

~

A couple of weeks after we sold our sheep at the auction, I was sent to ‘lead silage’ for my dad’s friend who owned the dark-green fields. I was put on a giant green John Deere tractor. The red trailer towed behind held about ten tonnes of grass. REM and the Smashing Pumpkins blasted and whined from the radio. Half a dozen of us had the task of leading grass from the ‘forager’, which hoovered up the juicy green grass and chopped it in the field, back to the silage ‘pit’ or ‘clamp’ in the farmyard. At the pit we had to tip the trailer, spewing the wedge of grass on to the concrete, and then race back to the field for another load. Weeks earlier Dad’s friend had sprayed, ‘top-dressed’, millions of tiny polystyrene-like balls of synthetic nitrogen on to the field in the spring with a tractor-driven ‘fertilizer drill’ and powered this grass into life. The grass was dense and deep and utterly uniform – all one species, high-performance ryegrass sewn a year ago – and it throve on the new shop-bought fertilizer. The field grew so quickly that not only were we harvesting the grass three weeks earlier than was ever possible in the past, it would regrow for as many as three or four cuts that season.

Silage is just pickled, moist green grass, but when it first arrived it was a kind of farming miracle. Unlike hay, it didn’t need sunshine to dry it and could be made in one day, even if it was raining. It made more nutritious food for cows, which then produced more milk or meat. The value of the improved nutrition of silage, relative to the hay that might otherwise be made on a farm like this, was valued in the tens of thousands of pounds.

That afternoon, we packed hundreds of tonnes of grass into the concrete and steel-sided silage clamp every hour. Our friend Rusty pushed it in with his tractor and a giant buck-rake, load after load, and rolled the air out of it. Just before it went dark, we sealed the pile of grass with a huge plastic sheet to make it ferment, and threw hundreds of used tyres on top to hold the sheet in place. We had a can of beer each, all of us proud to have got so much grass safely harvested in a day. When someone asked me when we would make ours, I felt embarrassed when I told them we might be another month. I didn’t mention that we still made lots of hay the old-fashioned