#47 – Jason Crawford on Progress Studies
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The Problem of Fertilizer in the Atmosphere
In the late 18 hundreds, a physicist who invented the crooks tube warned about how we were runng out of fertilizer. He called on chemists to solve this problem by coming up with some sort of synthetic fertilizer. But then what happened was, something came totally out of left field, which was we got mechanization. And so this helped to further agriculture had already begun to mechanize at the time,. but this began to further mechanize agriculture and a. When you lower the labor cost of the land, you can open up new lands that were marginally productive when they weren't profitable under other methods. So very often these things just come from unexpected sources.
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