Spreading Fertilizer

That old farmer, Nikita Khrushchev, has lately learned that a lot of things have changed down on the farm since he broke the Russian soil behind a mare. To explain away the fact that Russia harvests less than the U.S., though it cultivates twice as much farm land, Khrushchev insists: "Yields don't depend upon the system. It's merely a matter of the U.S.'s producing more mineral fertilizer." Fertilizer, for so long the essential ingredient of barnyard humor, has become a vital factor in the economic cold war, and Khrushchev has launched a costly crash program to quadruple Russia's output of plant food by 1970.

More from Less. Khrushchev learned his lesson from the huge U.S. fertilizer industry, which now produces 30 million tons of fertilizer a year--nearly twice as much as Russia--and is one of the principal reasons why U.S. farmers are able to coax the world's fattest crops from their land. U.S.-produced fertilizer--now almost completely chemical--is sprinkled on the earth by hand from bulky bags, sprayed on from lumbering field machines, dusted from low-flying planes, even pumped into irrigation streams. By pouring on five times as much fertilizer as they did 30 years ago, mechanized U.S. farmers are producing almost twice as much per acre of land (and thus fouling up the Government's acreage-control schemes).

Thanks to greater use of fertilizer, in combination with better seeds and pesticides, an acre that yielded 46 bu. of corn in the 1950s is now good for 64 bu. To demonstrate their axiom that $1 worth of fertilizer adds $3 in crop value, salesmen like to plant test plots along heavily trafficked highways in farm areas. Says Marketing Director J. P. Ekberg of Olin Mathieson, which operates the world's biggest fertilizer plant just outside Houston: "When the corn is twice as high as the corn growing next to it by the Fourth of July, people can easily see what a difference fertilizer makes."

Sales to Russia? Manufacturers reap a $1.5 billion-a-year harvest from fertilizer, and their sales are growing 9% annually. Led by the biggest manufacturer, International Minerals & Chemical Corp. of Skokie, Ill., some 20 companies have plowed into the field, including such chemical giants as W. R. Grace, Monsanto, Allied and Du Pont. Since few farmers still rely on the less effective animal fertilizers, many meat packers--including Armour and Swift --have kept up with the times by diversifying into chemical fertilizers. Lately, half a dozen U.S. oil companies--among them, Gulf, Socony Mobil, Cities Service and Kerr-McGee--have come into the business in a big way by buying up smaller fertilizer companies as marketing arms for petrochemical byproducts that they turn into ammonia fertilizers.

Natural gas is also a prime source of anhydrous ammonia, the key ingredient in nitrogen fertilizers. Because of its vast natural gas reserves--and its generous sources of phosphate, potash and other plant foods--the U.S. is the world's prime supplier of fertilizer. About 10% of the U.S. output is exported, mostly to developing nations that need more food for their rapidly expanding populations--Korea, Mexico, India and Chile.

But the greatest potential market is Russia. Khrushchev has told U.S. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, Roving Diplomat Averell Harriman and just about every other visiting businessman and journalist in Moscow that he is eager to buy not fertilizer but entire fertilizer plants from the U.S. Whether or not to sell him plants is a high-policy decision now facing President Johnson and Congress. One sticker is the Export Control Act, which bars the shipment of anything that would significantly help the Communist bloc's economy. Farmer Khrushchev would be the first to hope that U.S. fertilizer plants would do just that.

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