Hey /r/askhistorians!
I hope to God that this is the right sub to post this on - if not, please do tell me, and I'll remove the post.
I'm currently writing an assignment in which I have to incorporate methods used in both biotechnology and history. I've decided that it should be about the invention and production of synthetic fertilizers, specifically focusing on the Haber-Bosch Method. I'm struggling with finding any historical material that I can use however. I've found some decent statistical data that I can use, however I'd like to get my hands on some written material from the early 20th century in which this subject is discussed. Ideally, I'd like to be able to conclude what the general view on the use of synthetic fertilizers was in the early 1900s.
This subject seems to be a hot topic today, and as far as I can tell, it was discussed all the way back in the 1920's, but I haven't been able to find a source for this. Hope you can help me out here!
Have you seen this article? It is recently published, but in it several papers on the potentially negative effects of synthetic nitrogen applications from the '20s and '30's are cited. Three of them are accessible as PDFs, though you need subscriptions to the OVID database to access them.
Sir Albert Howard, a famous British agronomist and one of the founders of modern organic agriculture wrote a book in 1947 called The Soil and Health which discusses negative effects of synthetic fertilizers at least briefly.
That's all I've got! As you can see, these are all criticisms of fertilizer, which may not be what you're looking for, but it's difficult to discuss biotech and fertilizers these days without starting an argument, so that's what I have for you. Not sure if there have been any historical works on the general view of synthetic fertilizers previous to the Green Revolution, which would be after the time frame you requested. Hopefully those papers can provide you with something to start with; at the very least they demonstrate that fertilizer was being discussed in the first half of the 1900s. Hopefully someone else can provide you with something more substantive, I would be very curious to hear more about this as well.