Manawatu Daily Times Science and Business in Farming

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6814, 18 January 1929, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times Science and Business in Farming

rpHIS is the latest prophecy—from America—that fernoeis wi ii grow fuel. But it is backed by plausible arguments, and at the same time the scientist who made the statement, Dr. Charles M A. Stine, a leading chemist, had some more lmpoitant things to say to the annual meeting of the American barm Bureau Federation held last month in Chicago.

He pictured great areas devoted to the rapid growth of an enormous volume of vegetation as a cheap method of supplying a combination of hydrogen and carbon, and nearby huge chemical factories transforming the crop into fuel. While this development may be distant in time, it is not quite so fanciful, he said, as might appear.

Dr. Stine pointed out that industry may demand raw materials which originate upon the farm for the manufacture of synthetic products. “ What would be more logical,” he asked, “ than that applied science should develop new products dependent upon growth of new crops demanding increased acreage for the supply of the raw materials required ?

The development of potentialities of the nation s farms from the standpoint of their usefulness for the nation’s factories, as well as for the growth of foodstuffs calls for long continued and unbroken effort available only in government laboratories. This phase of the application of chemistry to the problem of broadening farm markets, Dr. Stine apparently felt mope important than chemistry’s possibilities in the utilisation of farm wastes.

“While there are definite commercial factory outlets for some of these waste products,” he said, ” estimating the total of farm wastes at an annual 750,000 tons, not more than a beginning has been made. The chemistry of the utilisation of agricultural products and by-products or wastes is still in its infancy.”

Mentioning some of the well-known instances of the use of agricultural wastes, he remarked that these examples arc striking chiefly because they are rare.” The economic questions of the collection and transportation of farm wastes are important, and the drying and pressing of the widely scattered materials are engineering problems of the first magnitude.

Virgil Jordan, chief economist of the National Industrial Conference Board of New York, challenged the “ view that there has been any fundamental improvement in the economic position of agriculture during the past six years.” He said that the agricultural industry “ will have to deal in some systematic, organised way first with the problem of eliminating the inefficient, chronically unsuccessful producer, whose output, produced without profit, bears down and demoralises the market.” r

In his summing up of the needs of agriculture, Mr. Jordan declared the problem was essentially one of getting and keeping the right men on the right land to produce the right products. “ To do this we shall need, in the first place, better knowledge of our soil resources and a comprehensive classification of our land. We shall need, secondly, fundamental changes in our policy of taxing farm land and forests in order to permit the withdrawal of a part of our farm acreage from productive use and stimulate its reforestation so that we may grow more of one of the most needed crops, a large part of which we now have to import.

“ We shall need thirdly, extended research on the part of the industry and agriculture to develop new industrial uses of existing farm products and new farm products for existing uses. Finally, we shall sooner or later have to face and answer the question whether or not the small independent farm is the size of productivity and the farm of productive organisation best adapted to the new conditions of agriculture.”