Modern Day Agriculture – a By-Product of War.
On April 19 a terrorist explosion destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, taking the lives of 168 people, injuring hundreds more. Many people were surprised to learn that the deadly blast was caused not by some high-security military explosive but by ordinary agricultural fertilizer mixed with fuel oil. How could a peaceful substance like crop fertilizer be used for such an insane and deadly purpose?
But when I heard about the ingredients used, my mind flashed to a passage from An Agricultural Testament, written in 1940 by Sir Albert Howard, the grandfather of modern organic farming:
“The feature of the manuring of the West is the use of artificial manures. The factories engaged during the Great War in the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen for the manufacture of explosives had to find other markets. The use of nitrogenous fertilizers in agriculture increased, until today the majority of farmers and market gardeners base their manurial programme on the cheapest forms of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) on the market. What may be conveniently described as the NPK mentality dominates farming alike in the experimental stations and the countryside. Vested interests, entrenched in time of national emergency, have gained a stranglehold”.
In other words, artificial nitrogen-based fertilizer is simply a by-product of the military technology of World War I. When the war ended, manufacturers had to find another market for nitrates, so they began to promote artificial fertilizer—with phenomenal success. Therefore when the federal office building was blown up a few months ago, the tragic fact is that the chemicals were only doing what they were originally designed to do—destroy things, and people.
