By 1850, worldwide population had grown to 1.3 billion; by 1900, 1.7 billion; by 1950, 2.6 billion. And then things really took off. Over the next fifty years, the population more than doubled, reaching well beyond 6 billion. If you had to pick a single silver bullet that allowed this surge, it would be ammonium nitrate, an astonishingly cheap and effective crop fertilizer. It wouldn’t be much of an overstatement to say that ammonium nitrate feeds the world. If it disappeared overnight, says the agricultural economist Will Masters, "most people’s diets would revert to heaps of cereal grains and root crops, with animal products and fruits only."
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