Liebig, Marx, and the depletion of soil fertility: relevance for today's agriculture - German chemist Justus von Liebig; Karl Marx

Monthly Review, July-August, 1998 by John Bellamy Foster, Fred Magdoff

During the period 1830-1870 the depletion of the natural fertility of the soil through the loss of soil nutrients was the central ecological concern of capitalist society in both Europe and North America (only comparable to concerns over the loss of forests, the growing pollution of the cities. and the Malthusian specter of overpopulation). This period saw the growth of "guano imperialism" as nations scoured the globe for natural fertilizers; the emergence of modern soil science; the gradual introduction of synthetic fertilizers; and the formation of radical proposals for the development of a sustainable agriculture, aimed ultimately at the elimination of the antagonism between town and country.

The central figure in this crisis of soil fertility was the German chemist Justus von Liebig. But the wider social implications were most penetratingly examined by Karl Marx. The views of Liebig and Marx on soil fertility were to be taken up by later thinkers, including Karl Kautsky and V.I. Lenin within the Marxist tradition. Still, by the mid-twentieth century the problem seemed to have abated due to the development of a massive fertilizer industry and the intensive application of synthetic fertilizers.

Today, a growing understanding of the ecological damage inflicted by the reliance on synthetic chemical inputs, the scale of which vastly increased following the Second Word War, has generated new interest in a sustainable agriculture in which soil nutrient cycling plays a central role. The need to devise an ecologically sound relationship of people to the soil is being rediscovered. What follows is a brief outline of the evolution of this issue over the last hundred and fifty years.

Liebig and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of the Soil

In the 1820s and 1830s in Britain, and shortly afterwards in the other developing capitalist economies of Europe and North America, concern over the "worn-out soil" led to a phenomenal increase in the demand for fertilizer. The value of bone imports to Britain increased from [pounds]14,400 in 1823 to [pounds]254,600 in 1837. The first boat carrying Peruvian guano (the accumulated dung of sea birds) arrived in Liverpool in 1835; by 1841 1,700 tons were imported, and by 1847 some 220,000 tons arrived. So desperate were European farmers in this period that they raided the Napoleonic battlefields (Waterloo, Austerlitz) for bones to spread over their fields.

The rise of modern soil science was closely correlated with this demand for increased soil fertility to support capitalist agriculture. In 1837 the British Association for the Advancement of Science solicited a work on the relationship between agriculture and chemistry from Liebig. The result was his Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (1840), which provided the first convincing explanation of the role of soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, in the growth of plants. In England Liebig's ideas influenced the wealthy landowner and agronomist J. B. Lawes, who had begun experiments on fertilizers on his property in Rothamsted, outside London in 1837. In 1842 Lawes introduced the first artificial fertilizer, after inventing a means of making phosphate soluble, and in 1843 he built a factory for the production of his new "superphosphates."

Nevertheless, this technology was slow to diffuse outside of Britain. The first factories for the production of superphosphates were introduced in Germany only in 1855; in the United States only after the Civil War; and in France only after the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, the results obtained from the application of a single nutrient (such as phosphate) to the soft, although initially producing dramatic results, tended to diminish rapidly after that, since overall soil fertility is always limited by the nutrient in least abundance (Liebig's Law of the Minimum).

Hence, Liebig's discoveries at first only intensified the sense of crisis within capitalist agriculture, making farmers more aware of the depletion of soil minerals and the paucity of fertilizers. This contradiction was experienced with particular acuity in the United States - especially among farmers in upstate New York and in the Southeastern plantation economy. Blocked from easy, economical access to guano (which was high in both nitrogen and phosphates) by the British monopoly on Peruvian guano supplies, the United States undertook - first unofficially and then as part of a deliberate state policy - the imperial annexation of any islands thought to be rich in this natural fertilizer. Under the authority of what became the Guano Island Act, passed by Congress in 1856, U.S. capitalists seized ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys around the globe between 1856 and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized by the Department of State as U.S. appurtenances. Nine of these guano islands remain U.S. possessions today. Yet guano imperialism was unsuccessful in providing the United States with the quantity and quality of natural fertilizer it needed.