Jean-Baptiste Boussingault

Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (1801 to 1887) was a French chemist whose field experiments helped found agricultural chemistry. Trained at the school of mines at Saint-Étienne, he worked in the Alsace asphalt mines and then in South America, where he served on the staff of Simon Bolivar and climbed Andean volcanoes, before returning to France in 1832. In 1839 he was appointed to the chair of agricultural and analytical chemistry at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. On an estate at Pechelbronn in Alsace he established in 1836 what is regarded as the first agricultural experiment station. There he analysed crops grown in rotation, showed that soil nitrogen increases after legume crops, and concluded that plants do not assimilate free nitrogen from the air, a basis of the nitrogen cycle. He wrote the Traité d'économie rurale, later reworked as Agronomie, chimie agricole et physiologie.