Can Germany produce enough nitrate to supply both its' agriculture and industry during WW1?

[Legault]

AFAIK, IOTL the biggest producer of nitrate was Chile and the blockade of Germany made it unable to import it. So Imperial Germany had to rely on the Haber-Bosch process to synthesize it. However, Germany didn't manage to fill both the need of ammonium nitrate as fertilizer and for explosive, the former was sacrificed and as a result a food shortage gradually worsened.
My questions would be:
-Why didn't Germany manage synthesize enough nitrate during the war?
- Could Germany prevent such shortage if they foresaw the possibility of a blockade (like, I believe the third Reich manage to prevent such shortage during WW2) ?

 

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Poor planning by the government. They thought the existing cyanamide process factories would produce enough, and didn't invest in Haber facilities until late 1915. BASF had to build the plants pretty much on their own dime, and hope their investment would pay off after winning the war.

See: The Synthetic Nitrogen Industry in World War I: Its Emergence and Expansion by Anthony S. Travis

Had they foreseen the blockades and shortages, they might have simply invested in more cyanamide capacity (more factories, and especially automation for the labor intensive steps like sizing and breaking up the raw materials)

 

[Garrison]

AFAIK, IOTL the biggest producer of nitrate was Chile and the blockade of Germany made it unable to import it. So Imperial Germany had to rely on the Haber-Bosch process to synthesize it. However, Germany didn't manage to fill both the need of ammonium nitrate as fertilizer and for explosive, the former was sacrificed and as a result a food shortage gradually worsened.
My questions would be:
-Why didn't Germany manage synthesize enough nitrate during the war?
- Could Germany prevent such shortage if they foresaw the possibility of a blockade (like, I believe the third Reich manage to prevent such shortage during WW2) ?

The Nazi's suffered exactly the same sort of shortages and indeed so did the whole of Western Europe, they fixed their food problem largely by starving people in Poland and the Ukraine.

As to your questions:

Synthesizing Nitrates required expensive plant and pre WWI Germany could meet its needs with imports and industry wasn't inclined to make the investment in plant that might never pay for itself.

Likewise there was no real economic incentive to stockpile huge quantities of imported Nitrates that might never be used. There's no central apparatus to buy it up and for that matter I'm not sure how much they could stockpile, it has to be stored somewhere after all.

You also have to factor in that a shortage of fertilizer was only one factor affecting the productivity of German agriculture. Young fit farm workers were prime candidates for military service, larges parts of German farm land was broken up among small inefficient peasant farms and Germany was also short of animal feed for pigs and cows because that was also imported, though not to the same degree as the 1920s and 30s

 

[BooNZ]

Poor planning by the government. They thought the existing cyanamide process factories would produce enough, and didn't invest in Haber facilities until late 1915.

No. The technology/methodology for widescale industrial production of nitrates using Haber methodologies did not exist before WW1 - the OTL catalyst used was not even identified until mid-1914. The development and design of German industrial production of nitrates has been compared to the Manhattan Project in terms of resources and scientific endeavor - even after the war, Entente scientists struggled to replicate German developments, despite access to German intellectual property.

BASF had to build the plants pretty much on their own dime, and hope their investment would pay off after winning the war.

No, it was more of a cost plus model implemented from October 1914 - verging on profiteering.