CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Case for Suppression

“He that pleadeth his cause first seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him out” (Proverbs 18:17, ASV). In fairness the suppression story should be heard first, in its strongest form, before it is searched out.

Here is how its best advocates would put it.

The argument

In the first decades of the twentieth century a method existed that raised crop yields by twenty to fifty percent using nothing but a little electricity. A Finnish professor had proved it. A British knight and a British government committee had confirmed it; the government’s own botanist measured a twenty-two percent average gain. The method required no fertilizer and little or no pesticide.

At exactly that moment a new industry was being built. In 1909 Fritz Haber showed how to make ammonia from the nitrogen of the air, and in 1913 the German firm BASF opened the first plant. The same process made explosives for two world wars. After each war enormous ammonia capacity stood idle, and it was turned to fertilizer. Chemical companies, among the largest corporations on earth, now depended on farmers buying nitrogen by the ton every year, forever. The same firms and their successors sold the pesticides.

A method that let the farmer grow more with less was a direct threat to that business. And look at what happened. The British committee was shut down. Its reports were never published and lay unseen in an archive for seventy years. The universities dropped the subject. A generation of agronomists was trained without hearing the word. Christofleau’s apparatus disappeared from the market. Is it likelier that a proven technique was simply forgotten, or that it was made to be forgotten?

What is true in it

A good deal of this is fact, and should be granted.

• The Haber–Bosch process and the electroculture trials do belong to the same years.
• The fertilizer industry did become enormous, and it did shape agricultural research, teaching and government policy to favor its products. That is ordinary, well-documented history.
• Industries have at times buried inconvenient science. The tobacco and lead industries are proven cases.
• The Electro-Culture Committee’s reports were in fact kept out of general circulation, and no one has given a fully satisfying account of why.
• The subject did all but vanish from agricultural science after 1936.

So the suppression story is not a foolish one. It fits a pattern that has really occurred, and it is built around a real oddity in the record. The question is whether, in this case, it is what happened. To answer that we have to do what the proverb says and search it out.