[A]s the world’s demand for agricultural products has grown, the nutrients needed to grow all our crops has far outpaced the rate at which bacteria can enrich soils. By the early 20th century, humanity urgently needed an artificial way of fixing nitrogen.  

The Haber-Bosch process was the solution. Chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch invented a method of combining nitrogen and hydrogen gas at high pressure and temperature, breaking apart the nitrogen bond, and enabling the freed atoms to fuse back together as ammonia. 

It’s also responsible for between 1 and 1.5 percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions every year, which is why some researchers are exploring ways to return to the biological fixation method, rather than continuing to rely on the mass production of fertilizers.

One potential avenue is breeding the bacteria to be more “promiscuous,” making them less picky about their choice of plant partner, explains Manish Raizada, an agriculture researcher at the University of Guelph in Canada. “There are opportunities to make [the bacteria] more compatible with more plant hosts,” he says. “We would call these elite strains. And these elite strains have been bred for traditional selection and breeding, they’re not GMOs.”

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