The Research by Alabama’s International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development Feeds the World.

By Todd Keith
Photos by Jason Wallis

There are two ways to start this remarkable story. The first begins with two Nobel Prize-winning
German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who in 1913 together developed the Haber-Bosch process to form ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen, allowing the production of tons and tons of fertilizers—an act that today is responsible for feeding around one-third of the population of the Earth. The men literally took nitrogen from the air and made food that staved off massive starvation.

The second way is to plainly state that the International Center for Soil Fertility & Agricultural Development (IFDC)— the transnational organization responsible for continuing this legacy—is in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It is a place perhaps best known as the home of the “Muscle Shoals Sound” heard in the recordings of musical legends like Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, The Rolling Stones, and more. But the far lesser known IFDC may arguably have had a larger global impact than those soul and rock giants. The IFDC holds the same international status as the United Nations or World Bank. Other than the United Nations or our own government, it is the only body in the United States that can issue visas to visitors from around the world. It is arguably the most important organization in the State of Alabama.

Why? Ask a Bangladeshi rice farmer who dramatically increased his yield so that he can now afford to repair his house and buy new clothing for his family. Ask an Albanian farmer who has been able to use IFDC publications, television spots, and technical assistance to make a living. That the town is known primarily for it’s rhythm section by most Alabamians highlights how, even in these trying economic times, most of us don’t have to worry about where our next meal comes from.

“Here in the United States, people do not understand the use of fertilizer since the cost of food is less than 10 percent of their income,” explains Dr. Amit Roy, IFDC President and CEO. “But in developing nations, food can be 90 percent of their income. Fertilizer is their life blood.” Since the 1930s, that lifeblood has flowed largely from the research and experimentation in laboratories and test plots in Muscle Shoals. “Seventy percent of the world’s known fertilizer comes from the IFDC. This is the epicenter,” Roy says. “Two billion people are alive today because of those fertilizers.”

Today, a staff of 120 (of 25 different nationalities) resides in Muscle Shoals, working in research and technical labs, greenhouses, training centers, geographical information systems work, and soil studies at the facility. Beyond the IFDC’s nerve center along the Tennessee River, more than 700 other staff members work in 22 countries worldwide such as Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tajikistan, and Togo. The center has also conducted technology transfer activities in more than 120 countries. The slogan, “Think Globally, Act Locally” never rang more true: the improvements in methods and fertilizer products emerging from Muscle Shoals are immediately implemented
worldwide.

So why Muscle Shoals? As most people know, in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley was essentially a third world country. Malaria was pervasive, the land abused and over-farmed. Poverty was rampant. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in 1933 to modernize the region through improving crop yields, providing jobs, and generating electricity. After building dams to provide power for munitions during World War II, in the peaceful years that followed, that energy was used to make fertilizers using the Haber-Bosch process. TVA took over the munitions plants and almost overnight, swords turned to plowshares. The TVA’s National Fertilizer Development Center was born. The infrastructure was all here in Alabama to create an international organization to address the use of fertilizers in feeding what we call the Third World.

An early international test came in the early 1960s. By 1961, India was facing mass famine. With help from American agronomist Norman Ernest Borlaug, who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts introducing high-yield wheat into the subcontinent, mass starvation was averted. As part of this Green Revolution, it became clear to those in the United States and beyond that the TVA’s National Fertilizer Development Center had a great fertilizer knowledge and technology that needed to be shared with developing nations experiencing a food risk. Created in 1974 as a nonprofit international organization to service the needs of the world’s developing countries, the IFDC is now the legacy of the TVA’s fertilizer center.

“All the knowledge, all the resources were here in Muscle Shoals, but the main reason we have the IFDC is that in 1965, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) asked TVA to spread fertilizer technologies to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia,” says John Shields, who was senior vice president and CEO of the National Fertilizer Program back in the TVA days. Shields is a character: modest, to the point, and knowledgeable.

Double-Edged Sword >>
Seventy-eight percent of the air we breathe is nitrogen. By taking nitrogen and hydrogen gas from the atmosphere to produce ammonia, which is then oxidized to make nitrates, we thus have nitrogen fertilizers that feed one-third of the world’s population. Of course, the Haber-Bosch process also meant that the full-scale production of munitions was cheap and easy for the first time. That is the flip side to the first part of this remarkable story: “Boom” went Europe in World War I. Thanks to the two German chemists work in turn-of-the-century Europe, Fritz Haber also gave the world chlorine gas that killed and destroyed thousands of lives during World War I. That the man who initiated the process that eventually would feed billions would be also known as the “father of chemical warfare” is quite an ironic turn. But then, the story of fertilizers is also the story of bombs (See the excellent The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager, 2008, for the full back story). The key is turning those swords to plowshares.

“I basically set this organization up back then and lived out of a suitcase those first 15 years,” Shields says with a laugh. He also witnessed TVA cut 10,000 employees out of 32,000 in one hard, fell swoop in the late 80s when the company began major restructuring. The challenge the IFDC faces today may be greater, though. “The environmental considerations are larger,” he explains. “There are tremendous food security issues, economic issues—especially in Africa. This stuff is not sexy—growing food, feeding mouths—but if you stop providing fertilizers, billions will die.”

Which is why Roy lured Shields back out of retirement to help the center as interim director of research
as they gear up to face the next threat to global stability, as experts suggest that food production will have to double by 2050. In a mere 41 years, the global population will go from 6 billion to 9 billion, and more people eat protein as their diets improve. While it takes one pound of nitrogen to produce one pound of bread, that ratio is an increasing 2-1 for fish, 3-1 for chicken, and an alarming 8-1 for beef. If more people around the world are going to eat like Americans and other Western citizens, a corresponding seismic shift must first occur in food production.

“The North Alabama area will be a huge part of that solution. We have the intellectual talent here. There is no other place in the country, the world prepared to do this but here in Muscle Shoals,” explains Roy. In a world where every four days we add one million people to the population—and 90 percent of those new mouths to feed are born in developing countries—the challenge is fully upon IFDC.

Working towards a solution, the center focuses on conquering inefficiencies in production, a hallmark of what will be the next generation of fertilizers. And relying less on fossil fuels since the environmental issues that in the 1960s were secondary are now of a primary concern to all involved. Beyond this, the IFDC works on a range of issues beyond just engineering and technology development such as policy reform, market development, and management information systems for plant nutrient management. While the agricultural development and progress of smallholder farmers all over the world is the primary focus of the IFDC, this description alone remains a stale one that does not take into account the grassroots, on-theground activities of the center. Amit Roy best summarizes the imperativeness of the IFDC. “A hungry man is a dangerous man,” Roy says. “You never have peace on an empty stomach. You can never be an environmentalist when your family is hungry.”

The specter of Thomas Malthus is an obvious reference point when considering the massive population growth expected by the middle of this century. It is a hard reality that Roy and others at the IFDC face every day. Malthus, an early 19th-century economistand demographer, is most famous for his treatise on population that stressed the potential catastrophic dangers of population growth. “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” Malthus said. And he was right. He just didn’t consider the power of the air. And what the International Center for Soil Fertility & Agricultural Development can do with it.