I know what you’re thinking, “bird poop?”

Yes, bird poop, you know the stuff that occasionally or always gets on your car? However, it has another name: guano, and believe it or not, it has a half a billion dollar industry centered around it. Now, I know you’re wondering why it has a whole industry, so I’ll just tell you: guano is about 10-15% phosphorus, 10-15% nitrogen, 3-5% potassium, and 10% magnesium ammonium phosphate. If you still don’t understand, let me give you a hint: fertilizer.

For those of you who are thinking, “but there are plenty better fertilizers,” I say yes, there are. That said, Guano is still more important than them, why? I’m glad you asked. In the 1800s and into the 1900s, people needed to eat, shocking, I know. However, people didn’t know how to grow crops well, particularly if they were European and growing crops in America. Then one fateful day, someone realized that if you took a snow shovel of bird poop to the crops, they would grow stronger than before. 

So, since people like eating, everyone wanted to coat their crops in bird poop; this is admittedly counterintuitive and sounds like a great way to get sick. But, I’m going to assume that they prepared their food well enough that it didn’t matter, because guano became known as “white gold.”

At its most valuable, guano cost $62.5 per ton, which, if adjusted for inflation, is $2,500 today. Admittedly, this is considerably less than gold, but Peru, the main exporter of this “guano,” has made over 2.7 billion dollars from this trade. However, the fertilizer industry is valued at approximately 300 billion dollars, making guano look small in comparison. The importance of that guano cannot be overstated; it is what the Industrial Revolution was built on top of. 

Thanks to guano, there was now enough food to sustain the growing population of that era.