Back in February when Russia invaded Ukraine was when I first wrote about the high price of fertilizers this year and the reason why. Ukraine was a major fertilizer manufacturing hub for all of Europe and well as the bread bas- ket for most of western Europe.

I have learned a lot more about the global fertilizer market since then. Back in February if you hap- pened to buy any fertilizer companies stock, you would see currently between a 25 to 30 percent gain in just eight months.

Nitrogen is one of the building blocks of life and has been in high demand this year and as a result, profits for North American fertilizer companies have ex- ploded. As anyone who lives by a farm can attest, the main form of nitrogen fertilizer is manure; cow, horse, chicken, duck or pig. Plants need many elements to thrive, and none is more important than nitrogen, which forms proteins, and thus tissue, for all living things.

Air is mostly nitrogen, but farming depends on more reactive nitrogen compounds, like am- monia, made from nitrogen and hydrogen. And if we relied just on manure for fertilizer, the planet would only be able to support a population of around four billion people.

On November 15 of this year, we’re projected to hit eight billion people worldwide. The extra four billion people owe their existence to a German chemist named Fritz Haber who spent World War I de- veloping a process for making ammonia from air, using hydrogen gas, pressure, and a catalyst. The Haber process converts atmospheric nitrogen (N2) to am- monia (NH3) by a reaction with hydrogen (H2) using a metal catalyst under high temperatures and pressures. Haber was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.