FUTURE FOOD SUPPLY.

Waikato Times, Volume 108, Issue 18158, 24 October 1930, Page 3

FUTURE FOOD SUPPLY.

SIR W. CROOKE’S PROPHECY USING UP OUR RESOURCES.

Professor Henry B. Armstrong writes in the London Sunday Times: The British Association is meeting this week at Bristol after an interval of thirty-three years. I was present on the last occasion and heard my distinguished friend, Sir William Crookes, deliver the presidential address. At the time, this was thought to be not merely sensational, hut revolutionary; it has often since been quoted from. I may mention that he announced the coming of wi”e.le:-P communication. De Rougemont.also came before the meeting and was held to be a romancer; his story may have been embroidered, lut it was afterwards mostly justified. 'Crookes now seems to have been the greater romancer. He talked of a coming shortage of wheat, a world-famine in bread, using the words:— “Are we to go hungry and to know the trial of scarcity? That is the pregnant question. Thirty years is but a day in the life of a nation. Those present who may attend the meeting of the British Association thirty years hence will judge how my forecasts are justified. ’’ Thirty-three years later the position is in no way that which he indicated. So 'much wheat is being produced by intensive methods amounting to nothing short of robbery, spoken of, I believe, as wheat mining, in certain favoured regions, that we in England, at least, cannot grow it at a profit. More and more of our land is being put down to grass and used only for grazing purposes. To analyse such a situation here is impossible. Was Crookes altogether wrong or merely out in his estimate of our expectation of an easy wheaten life?

An Inhuman Industry.

Pew will doubt the soundness of his argument in principle. He was wrong in his diagnosis as a whole. He thought that the prime difficulty lay in securing a sufficient supply of nitrogenous fertilisers—wheat being preeminently a plant that demands additional nitrogen, in the form of either ammonia or a nitrate, beyond that which it can obtain from the soil, if a paying crop is to be produced under the conditions of cultivation of all the old agricultural areas. It does not pay any farming community in the Old World to grow wheat, if the crop be only that of North-West Canada or Australia. Their practice cannot be called farming. Wheat growing is a paying proposition in Canada only because of the wide areas available and the use of a highly developed mechanical system of gathering in and otherwise dealing with the grain on its way to market. The industry is an inhuman one, just as the motor-car industry is inhuman, everything being done in both to minimise the use of human labour.

The Nitrogen Problem. Crookes thought of the problem in terms of the amount of nitrogen then available in the soil as nitrate deposits and as ammonia from coal, a by-product of the coke and gas industries. This was clearly not enough, and would need to be supplemented. He had succeeded in burning atmospheric nitrogen electrically, and looked forward to the artificial production of nitrate. Meanwhile, it has been found to be surprisingly easy to manufacture ammonia from air and steam, given "the necessary machinery and capital. This sudden great addition to our resources, however has had as yet little, if any, effect upon wheat production; the main result has been to lame existing producers and upset the nitrogen market. Still, ultimately, the discovery must save the nitrogen situation, and it will be long before we lack food merely because of a shortage of nitrogenous fertilisers.

Trend of Civilisation. The problem now before us is a far greater one that that Sir William Crookes foreshadowed, far more difficult to solve, because human nature at. large is concerned. In the first place, we must consider the question of work—how many can be usefully employed under the : conditions of modern civilisation: what to do with the surplus, if we allow one? .There can be little doubt that we are very near to, if we have not already overstepped, the limits of useful production by machinery.

We in England have little raw material to draw upon. Only America seems to have “coinable" raw materials; these are being used up at an alarming rate. Much of our expenditure is upon matters which cannot be ranked as necessities. Education has given us a great desire for intellectual occupation; those who study mostly do so to improve their worldy circutnstances. Halt somewhere we must. The general intelligence seems to be untouched, especially that of the politician, however much the science we so boast of may help us to synthesise ammonia, to ily, and to talk around the world. We are still unable to talk rationally among ourselves and about our affairs. If we ask the question what qualification any of our rulers ■and politicians have —what real training they have had in the calculated use of knowledge, the answer is "Not the least.” We cannot go on much longer without making collective use of our knowledge—in disregard of scientific advance.

Phosphate Starvation. Our future supply of food will be determined, not by nitrogen, but primarily by phosphate and also by potash. * The centring element, in the cell nucleus, in plant and animal alike is phosphorus. The two materials are all but absent from light, sand soils; they are present, in fair proportions, only in heavy clay land — but are only slowly available, The complete story of agriculture is told in the experimental plots at Rothamsted, Herts, now nearly ninety years old. I have studied them since 1870. It may be seen .there that phosphate and potash must be applied, at appropriate intervals, even to heavy SO il —to obtain an economic crop. Autonomy will not help India in the least, unless its state of general phosphate starvation be met. Most of Australia seems to be without phosphate: the forests have led the way in showing how small a part of its total area is worthy of occupation. Africa does not seem to be much better off. Holland probably is alone in holding land worth having—in the East Inflies—cultivated, naturally "by volcanoes. The available natural stores of phosphate and potash are few and far between, and not illimitable. So it must come that we shall dispute over these in a not very remote future. The situation is one politicians should face without delay. We have not begun to think of its gravity.