Fritz Haber Quotes

Agricultural husbandry essentially maintains the balance of bound nitrogen.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

Weeds play an important part in building soil fertility and in balancing the biological community . . .

We move the cows every day to a new spot which allows the grass time to recuperate and go through its what I call 'the teenage growth spurt.'

It has been recognized since the dawn of microbiology that the soil is inhabited by a living microscopic population which is responsible for the numerous reactions that take place in the soil and that affect the life and economy of man in many ways.

People need to realize how powerful the transformation of soil can be.

China's use of 'night soil,' as the Chinese rightly call a manure that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilizations - the Maya, for one - floundered when their soils turned to dust.

Nitrogen fertilizer is used on all crops produced in this country, but it is a key plant nutrient to produce corn a critical crop to Illinois farmers.

If you build up the soil with organic material, the plants will do just fine.

The winter period between September and March in this country, when land sits fallow and is subject to topsoil loss, we could be enriching the soil and growing all the biomass we need to replace imported gasoline.

You would have thought that our first priority would be to ask what the ecologists are finding out, because we have to live within the conditions and principles they define. Instead, we've elevated the economy above ecology.

Vegetables deplete soil. They're extractive. If soil has a bank account, vegetables make the largest withdrawals.

You can't have a healthy civilization without healthy soil. You can't have junk food and have healthy people.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Topsoil is a place of digestion. It sucks and chews things into smaller pieces. When it's hungry, it turns grey and stony; when it's thirsty, it opens thousands of cracked lips. Subsoil is more skeletal: it doesn't digest.

My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.

We have to stop treating soil like dirt.

As far as plants are concerned, they can't tell whether that nitrate ion comes from artificial chemicals or from decomposed organic matter.

A program to make municipal composting of food and yard waste mandatory and then distributing the compost free to area farmers would shrink America's garbage heap, cut the need for irrigation and fossil-fuel fertilizers in agriculture, and improve the nutritional quality of the American diet.

Naturally healthy soil can sustain coffee crops for generations to come. All of this contributes to the quality of the bean.

Micronutrient deficiency in the soil results in micronutrient malnutrition in people, since crops grown on such soils tend to be deficient in the nutrients needed to fight hidden hunger.

You can't chemical your way out of soil infertility

The sun gives spirit and life to the plants and the earth nourishes them with moisture.