Bird droppings were a foundation of modern agriculture and American empire

The Strait of Hormuz closure choked off a chunk of the world's fertilizer supply, and The Conversation traces that same vulnerability back to a stranger source: bird droppings. Nineteenth-century farmers depended on guano, seabird excrement piled up over centuries on Pacific islands, to replenish soils exhausted by industrializing cities that no longer returned nutrients to the countryside. The trade came at brutal human cost, as reports from the Chincha Islands and Navassa Island described indentured Chinese laborers and Black workers from Baltimore hacking apart cementlike guano under punishing conditions. That scramble for fertilizer even reshaped American foreign policy, as the Guano Islands Act of eighteen fifty-six let U.S. citizens claim unoccupied guano islands, extending the country's territorial reach well beyond its shores.

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