In discussing innovation in Chapter 2, we focused on the two great waves of innovation in the 20th century – the green revolution and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) – to situate the radical transformations underway in the agri-food system. The industrialization of agricultural activities, however, began much earlier in the 19th century, first in Europe and later in the United States. Empirical knowledge about the soil led to the emergence of a proto-fertilizer industry from ground bones (brought even from the cemeteries of the Napoleonic wars on the European continent) and guano (bird droppings) from the Pacific islands of Peru. With the scientific identification of soil nutrients by Liebig (which, according to Karl Marx, was worth more than all the contributions of the economists of the time!), the fertilizer industry emerged in Europe, replacing agricultural fallow practices, where land was periodically left uncultivated or subjected to burning to replenish the soil nutrients. The Haber–Bosch ammonia synthesis was developed to produce nitrogen products, first in Germany by BASF, and then in England by the company ICI, already mentioned in relation to single-cell proteins, which dominated the fertilizer industry for much of the 20th century (Foster, 1999).

On the other side of the Atlantic, it was labour that was most in short supply to clear the agricultural frontier of the American Midwest, and consequently the first phase of industrialization in the United States took the form of mechanization in the industrial appropriation of agricultural labour through the creation of machines and tools for all phases of the agricultural cycle. In 1830 John Deere, a blacksmith by trade, launched a steel plough that became a great success and, in the following century, spearheaded the creation of the tractor industry. J.I. Case (today, New Holland and CNH Industrial) established steam-powered grain threshing machines in the 1860s and later introduced combine harvesters (Goodman et al, 1987). Both companies today lead the development of precision agriculture with their intelligent tractors and machines.

Thus, the fertilizer and agricultural machinery industries developed separately, including geographically, in their transformation of agricultural into industrial activities, leaving the farmer to manage this new combination of costs and practices.