It was 1832 and John Bennet Lawes I was just 17 years old, had a huge estate in the heart of Hertfordshire and lots of free time. He had just been kicked out of Oxford and had returned to the mansion he inherited from his father a decade earlier. Now he just had to see what he did with his life.
He didn’t know it, but he was about to launch the oldest running experiment in history: the Broadbalk Experiment.
What if we plant four herbs? This is how Lawes began, growing medicinal plants on the farm and testing the effects of various fertilizers in a handful of pots. Things went well and, a couple of years later, the experiments expanded to field crops.
Young John Bennet’s intention was simple: to make farmers no longer have to rely on animals to produce fertilizers.
He got it. Wow he did it. In 1842, he patented a phosphate-based fertilizer that revolutionized the world of agriculture and ushered in the era of industrial fertilizers. It was made of gold, of course. But that is not what interests us today.
What interests us is that from the autumn of 1843 and to study the long-term effects of different fertilizers and manures on the yield of winter wheat and soil fertility, he began planting wheat in Rothamsted.
What does it consist of? The first harvest was in 1844 and, since then, strips of wheat have been grown with different fertilizer treatments throughout the field. That means some strips have received the same amount of fertilizer for more than 160 years.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been changes, of course. The Broadbalk experiment is a living thing and has changed over time to address new scientific problems (such as the introduction of different varieties of wheat or the application of new breeding approaches).
It has been a great success, too. Not only did it allow (and allows) fine-tune with unprecedented accuracy the amount, frequency or type of fertilizer we should use; Broadback has generated a large amount of data and samples (of grain, straw and soil) that are used by scientists around the world for long-term studies on environmental impact and agricultural sustainability.
It is not something trivial.
The argument about not knowing what the long-term impact of things will be is not only reasonable, it’s a good one. This experiment has allowed us to dispel all the doubts we had regarding one of the most important technologies in the world: which has allowed that we are more than eight billion people in the world.
Image | James Baltz
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