Conventional farming’s advent dates to the First World War era, and its technological advances. These included creating explosives by extracting nitrogen from the atmosphere (see the Haber-Bosch process) which led to the development of nitrogen-based fertilizers or NPK. Nerve gas used in trench warfare were the prototypes for insecticides; and agricultural tractors were the off-spring of modified military tanks (who, unlike inanimate metal tanks produced no manure for soil fertility, hence the need for quick-fix NPK.