During the insurrection of the Spanish colonies, the president of Gran-Colombia, the liberator Simón Bolívar, named Francisco Antonio Zea, ambassador in France, to contract youngers and singles European scientists to investigate the available sources of his new formed nation.

Three years later he was dismissed from his professorship on account of his political opinions, but so much resentment at this action was shown by scientific men in general, and especially by his colleagues, who threatened to resign in a body, that he was reinstated.

[6] His first papers were concerned with agricultural and mining topics, and his sojourn in South America yielded a number of miscellaneous memoirs, on the cause of goitre in the Cordilleras, the gases of volcanoes, earthquakes, tropical rain, &c., which won the commendation of Alexander von Humboldt.

He collaborated with Jean Baptiste Dumas in writing an Essai de statique chimique des litres organists (1841), and was the author of Traite d'economie rurale (1844), which was remodelled as Agronomie, chimie agricole, et physiologie (5 vols., 1860–1874; 2nd ed., 1884), and of Etudes sur la transformation du fer en acier (1875).

As he was a chemist, which was at that time a rapidly expanding field, and as the application of such science to agriculture was overdue, it is logical that many of Boussingault's contributions from his work related to soil chemical and plant nutritional knowledge.

His experimental station did not survive him, or rather could not withstand the vacillations of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war despite some revealing respect for intellectual works in WWII anecdotes, but his discoveries were built on by others, including his better known contemporary, Liebig – who loudly acknowledged Boussingault as the pioneer and great discover of many advances in soil and plant chemistry.

Most popular literature lists Boussingault as a contributor to the petroleum development of Alsace, and as being one of the few outsiders who married into the industrialist Le Bel family to be accepted by them in the long term.

Boussingault left several volumes of memoirs, which range in subject matter from his very diverse scientific inquiries to his more colorful personal adventures, notably with Bolivar and others in South America.