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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Most of the nitrogen in currently living humans was captured from the atmosphere via the Haber Bosch process.

That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).

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I know farmers who grow velvet beans and other nitrogen fixers and have huge yields. They’re somewhere between permaculture and organic farmers, though, so not industrial scale. It’d be nice if we could come up with a good way to scale permaculture.

I was getting curious recently if there was a suitability for running mini Haber Bosch equipment in small batches that would serve a neighborhood or town, or a homestead. Not sure really but it was interesting to contemplate distributing that load over many folks.

Based on playing Civ I just assumed they were mostly valuable for their use in making gunpowder.

You seem surprised that a game simplified the mechanics of the real world until they are unrecognizable.

It did indeed make more sense to me to go to war for a strategic, scare and faraway military resource than to go through all that effort for fertilizer.

> […] all that effort for fertilizer.

Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament factories) is a strategic military resource.

You have to either grow it yourself or import it. Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).

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