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Phosphorus cannot be manufactured. It cannot be synthesised from air like nitrogen, which is what the Haber-Bosch process does. It has to be mined.
Phosphate rock. A sedimentary deposit formed from the accumulated bones and excrement of ancient marine organisms, compressed over millions of years into stone. You find it in Morocco, in China, in the western United States. You dig it up, process it into fertiliser, and spread it on fields.
Modern agriculture requires it. Without synthetic phosphorus fertiliser, global crop yields would drop by an estimated 50%. The Green Revolution, the one Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Prize for, the one credited with saving a billion lives, is not simply a story of improved seeds. It is a story of phosphorus. The seeds need the phosphorus. The phosphorus needs the mines.
Morocco controls approximately 70% of the world's remaining known phosphate reserves.
One country.
Phosphate rock is not recyclable in any meaningful sense once applied to fields. It runs off into waterways, binds to soil, feeds algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie, and it is gone. Dissipated. Unrecoverable.
Global reserves, at current extraction rates, will last somewhere between 300 and 400 years. Some estimates say less. The USGS revised its reserve figures significantly downward in 2011 after a methodology review. The revision was not widely reported.
When the phosphate runs out, the fertiliser runs out. When the fertiliser runs out, the yields collapse. When the yields collapse, the food system that replaced the prairies and the bison and the Ogallala Aquifer has nowhere left to go.
The people who describe grass-fed beef as an unsustainable use of land have presumably not done the phosphorus maths.
The cow eats grass.
The grass grows back.
Nobody mines anything.
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