Christopher Morris (University of Texas at Arlington), “Nitrogen, Inc.: Global Chemical Conglomerates and the Little Guy”

Comment: Timothy J. LeCain, Montanta State University

The transformation of nitrogen from a scarce, expensive commodity that came from overseas to abundant, cheap commodity produced at home transformed the world for farmers. My project tells that story from the bottom up, through the life of Ned Cobb, a little guy whose life was forever changed, for better and for worse, by the rise of a big American agro-chemical industry. On the eve of war in Europe, global consumption of nitrogen stood at 700,000 to 750,000 tons, more than half supplied by Chilean desert nitrates. On the eve of the next world war, global consumption of nitrogen reached 2.5 million tons annually, only one-tenth of which came from Chilean nitrates. The U.S. had become nitrogen independent, thanks to new technologies and the emergence of a home-grown chemical industry.

Eighty percent of synthetically fixed nitrogen went into fertilizer. Ned Cobb a black tenant farmer in Alabama, depended on nitrogen to keep his fields productive. When it was scarce and expensive and in control of white men, it was a tool in Ned Cobb’s oppression. The success of Du Pont and other companies at transforming nitrogen scarcity into abundance transformed Ned’s life, first by helping to undo the shackles of racial oppression, and in the end, by transforming American agriculture. Abundance meant cheaper farm inputs, lower debt, and less risk which was all good for Ned Cobb, at least for a while. It also meant increased productivity, falling agricultural commodities prices, and declining farm incomes, which could be countered only by growth in production. And so, agriculture and the nitrogen industry grew together.