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Shmoop! Agriculture, well between 1960 and 1980 the world's green

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production almost doubled. So what happened? [Screams and people running] How did we go from "oh no

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agricultural productivity has limits whatever shall we do" to shoot

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"we sure are glad there aren't any limits to agriculture let's eat a million

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potatoes to celebrate." Yeah well a little something on the green revolution happened little John Wayne and

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[colonial man on farm] no that doesn't refer to the vegetable

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revolutionaries taking over the world. Are there vegetable revolutionaries? Oh we

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digress. Well the Green Revolution referred to a

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bunch of technological and ideological changes between 1940 and 1970 that increased

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agricultural productivity by leaps and bounds which is cool but definitely not

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[guy riding corncob in grass field] as cool as an army of vegetable revolutionaries riding giant ears of

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corn into battle. Don't tell us that's impossible. Anyway

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some industrialized countries developed new farming technologies and decided to

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spread them around the world. They did it partly because they were worried about

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world's hunger and partly because they were terrified that hungry people would

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turn to communism. Which is almost as scary as a hunger.

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[Airplane flying over green house] Well the Green Revolution was super successful the whole world transition

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toward more industrial agriculture and global yields or the amount of food per

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acre went way way up. Why? Because things like pesticides, higher yielding kinds of

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crops, large-scale irrigation and herbicides made fields more productive [plane spraying crops]

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than ever before. Except there's one tiny little hitch or several hitches. It was

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actually hitch city. First that's pesticides and herbicides are dangerous and it

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turns out that putting chemical poisons on our food can have some really bad side [snow white eating poison apple]

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effects. Wow, big shocker yeah. Second native crops disappeared, new high

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yielding crops were all the rage so cool native varieties started to go the way

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of the dodo bird. Finally farming use to be free and well it

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wasn't entirely free but most farmers around the world had very limited tools

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and they saved seed from their crops each year to plant in the spring. [Man spreading seeds in field]

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Well in industrial agriculture farmers have to buy pesticides, herbicides, seeds and

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machines. Small farmers ended up deeply in debt. Plus higher yields cause

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the price of food to drop those small farmers couldn't always remake the money

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they'd spent. Well on the bright side they had a nice big empty space to cry

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on. But one of the first big movers and shakers of the Green Revolution was a

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guy named Fritz Haber, he was a genius chemist who realized that we could bust

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up the nitrogen carbon in the air by putting it in a tank and subjecting it

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to a lot of heat and pressure. Well to be fair you can bust up any party that way.

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Then we add hydrogen into the mix and eventually the molecular bonds pop. The

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nitrogen and hydrogen bond together and we get a trickle of ammonia.

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[scientist in lab] Well ammonia is super toxic but it can be broken down and used for anything and all

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of our nitrogen needs. It can even be made into fertilizer. But with that the

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world's nitrogen problems were basically over. While farmers no longer had to

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worry about exhausting the nitrogen in their soil they could just replant same

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crop year after year crammed with nitrogen and always good. Well they could

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also plant crops in poor quality soil that had never been farmed before,

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because all they had to do was toss the nitrogen at it and well something grew.[plants growing in dirt field next to father and son]

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Well the Haber process was cheap and effective and a good long-term solution

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since we are never going to run out of air. If we run out of air

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we got bigger problems on our hands. We got to call Elon Musk and get a ride to Mars or something. [man coughing and passing out]

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