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decomposition so much as a stage, since a whole other group of organisms slowly breaks humus down into the chemical elements plants need to grow, elements including, but not limited to, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. This process is as much biological as chemical, involving the symbiosis of plants and the mycorrhizal fungi that live in and among their roots; the fungi offer soluble nutrients to the roots, receiving a drop of sucrose in return. Another critical symbiotic relationship links plants to the bacteria in a humus-rich soil that fix atmospheric nitrogen, putting it into a form the plants can use. But providing a buffet of nutrients to plants is not the only thing humus does: It also serves as the glue that binds the minute mineral particles in soil together into airy crumbs and holds water in suspension so that rainfall remains available to plant roots instead of instantly seeping away.

To reduce such a vast biological complexity to NPK represented the scientific method at its reductionist worst. Complex qualities are reduced to simple quantities; biology gives way to chemistry. As Howard was not the first to point out, that method can only deal with one or two variables at a time. The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.

In the case of artificial manures—the original term for synthetic fertilizers—Howard contended that our hubris threatened to damage the health not only of the soil (since the harsh chemicals kill off biological activity in humus) but of “the national health” as well. He linked the health of the soil to the health of all the creatures that depended on it, an idea that, once upon a time before the advent of industrial agriculture, was in fact a commonplace, discussed by Plato and Thomas Jefferson, among many others. Howard put it this way: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Howard’s flight of rhetoric might strike our ears as a bit over the top (we are talking about fertilizer, after all), but it was written in the heat of the pitched battle that accompanied the introduction of chemical agriculture to England in the 1930s and 1940s. “The great humus controversy,” as it was called, actually reached the floor of the House of Lords in 1943, a year when one might have thought there were more pressing matters on the agenda. But England’s agriculture ministry was promoting the new fertilizers, and many farmers complained their pastures and animals had become less robust as a result. Howard and his allies were convinced that “history will condemn [chemical fertilizer] as one of the greatest misfortunes to have befallen agriculture and mankind.” He claimed that the wholesale adoption of artificial manures would destroy the fertility of the soil, leave plants vulnerable to pests and disease, and damage the health of the animals and peoples eating those plants, for how could such plants be any more nutritious than the soil in which they grew? Moreover, the short-term boosts in yield that fertilizers delivered could not be sustained; since the chemicals would eventually destroy the soil’s fertility, today’s high yields were robbing the future.

Needless to say, the great humus controversy of the 1940s was settled in favor of the NPK mentality.

HOWARD POINTED DOWN another path. “We now have to retrace our steps,