Fertilizer

In agrarian times, pigeon poop was often was used as a dowry because it served as good fertilizer.

In the 1790s, an Oxford student introduced using guano (the accumulated excrement of seabirds and bats) as fertilizer. He spread guano across the university lawn, using it to spell G U A N O. The lawn was soon scrubbed, but when spring came, the word GUANO was clearly visible, growing higher and thicker than the rest of the grass.

Before oil was discovered in Texas, the state’s richest export was bat droppings which were used as fertilizer.

An estimated 300,000 mummified cats were found at Beni Hassan, Egypt in the late 19th century. They were sold at $18.43 per ton, and shipped to England to be ground up and used for fertilizer.

German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch's discovery of how to synthesize nitrogen into ammonia meant fertilizer could be produced on an industrial scale. Haber and Bosch were later awarded Nobel prizes, in 1918 and 1931 respectively,  for their invention of the Haber–Bosch process,

It is estimated that two thirds of annual global food production uses nitrogen from the Haber–Bosch process, and that this supports nearly half the world population. It's said to be the possibly the mist significant scientific discovery of the 20th century. 

Run off from fertilizers is creating vast “dead zones” in the ocean which have no fish, a 2004 UN report warned . Five areas off Britain are among nearly 150 globally which have been starved of oxygen because of pollution from nitrogen-based fertilisers. The number of dead zones doubled between 1990 and the year of the report.

Tomato plants fertilized with human urine produce up to four times more fruit and had higher levels of beta-carotene and protein than traditional fertilizers.

The use of commercial fertilizers has increased steadily in the last 50 years, rising almost 20-fold to the current rate of 100 million tonnes of nitrogen per year.

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Source Daily Mail