We go through a lot of food everyday, how do we do that? How do we have enough food for billions of people to eat everyday? What are some of the problems that the supply chain faces these day? (Feel free to expand on any other questions too!)
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The main reason that we have enough food (for now) for everyone:
Nitrogen.
Plants require nitrogen from the soil to grow properly, and as we grow plants in soil they deplete that nitrogen. So eventually the soil can’t support healthy plants.
Although the Earth’s atmosphere is just under 80% nitrogen, plants can’t use this form of it. They need it in the soil and to absorb it in a specific manner. Once this was discovered, we went to work finding sources for nitrogen fertilizers that would allow us to grow healthy crops and more of them.
For a long time, this was in the form of bird and bat guano- entire islands that had been bird/bat roosting and nesting sites for millennia became one of the most important resources in the world. They were so critical that there was (still is!) a United States law that allows any US citizen to lay claim to any unclaimed island containing guano deposits- and to be backed by the US military in that claim. (The Guano Islands Act of 1856).
Prior to humans being able to create nitrogen in a form plants could use, we would have enough food to feed less than half the current global population. Guano was being depleted faster than it was being replenished and chemists worked for years to find ways to synthesize ammonia- which is made of nitrogen and hydrogen, but the nitrogen in a form that plants can use instead of the atmospheric version. Once that process was perfected, global food production skyrocketed.
Without nitrogen fertilizer, well over half of humanity would not exist.
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