prof. sutter: my name is paul sutter, i am a professor here at the university of colorado, boulder. this is an introduction to global history. today, our lecture is on agriculture and the fertilizer revolution. we began this course talking about agriculture with regards to the unending frontier, the expanding across the world, and the birth of the plantation complex in tropical regions. andher critical storyline the environmental history of agriculture has been agricultural intensification. the growing, intensifying land-use to get more crops out of those lands. this coincides with the industrial revolution, which inated a real need for those europe and the united states to really concentrate on increasing food production to escape the that population would grow faster than a food production. there was the green revolution, where modern agriculture and genetic engineering was introduced to the developing world. today i want to talk about the 19th century and the fertilizer revolution. in a most ge

prof. sutter: yes. these are bison bones. people hunted bisons on the american plains almost to extinction. when the bison were all but gone, commercially extinct, the next industry that hit the great plains was an industry to collect bones, which were then ground up into fertilizer. yes, the question? stuart: is the bison species extinct? prof. sutter: no, it is not. but it was the subject of intense market hunting. and they got to the point where there were so few left, there was a growing conservation movement to keep them from going extinct. and now they made a big comeback, although a lot of the bison we see, are crossed with cattle, so they are beefalos. there is a genetic mix there. that gives you a sense of how w important bones were to the fertilizer trade. well, a quick scientific foray. here, soil science is also critical to the story. and i won't bore you with too many details. but coming into the 19th century, scientists believed in the humus theory of soil fertility, the idea that it

prof. sutter: my name is paul sutter, i am a professor here at the university of colorado, boulder. this is an introduction to global history. today, our lecture is on agriculture and the fertilizer revolution. we began this course talking about agriculture with regards to the unending frontier, the expanding across the world, and the birth of the plantation complex in tropical regions.