VI. THE FARMER'S INTEREST IN CHEMISTRY GEORGE M. ROMMEI., THEINDUSTR~AI. CoMMlTTEE OR SAVANNAH. GEORGIA
The earliest manufacturing chemists were the prehistoric men who first placed seeds in the ground, nurtured the plants, garnered the matured grain, stored it, and processed it in one way or another for the sustenance of man and beast. Primitive woman played the part of the laboratory worker and operating engineer, whose daily duties made her familiar with the practical application of chemistry to the conversion of indigestible products of the soil into foods which would not upset aboriginal tummies. Perhaps the close familiarity of the race with these primeval chemical reactions explains the indifference of most farmers to chemical stories about their main concerns in life. It is no secret that, as a class, books on agricultural chemistry are not in great demand. Agricultural journals run columns on chemical subjects as a sort of vicarious duty to their subscribers, trembling the meanwhile a t their "deadliness," as any agricultural editor will tell you. But we have the perverse fact before us that one of the best sellers in America among agricultural books has for a generation been "Feeds and Feeding," 6rst put out by Dean W. A. Henry of the University of Wisconsin, and now carried on under the direction of his disciple and associate, Dr. F. B. Morrison of Cornell. Dean Henry insisted that technical terms meant something which could not be conveyed by the so-called "popular" substitutes; a farmer was a technician and might just as well get used to using technical terms. So he sang them to his readers and they liked the music. Proteins, carbohydrates, and ether extract, nitrogenfree extract, crude fiber, digestible nutrients, enzymes, and ferments became commonplace notes which made sweet harmony to the livestock farmers. After Henry's overture, it was easy for McCollum and his crowd to get them to listen to the song of the vitamins. And, as a sort of interlude, the ear-splitting Wagnerisms of the Mendelians went over with a hang. Dean Henry sugar-coated his chemistry. On the title page of "Feeds and Feeding" appeared the old adage, "The eye of the master fattens his cattle." At once he caught his readers' interest, hut the amazing thing about the whole accomplishment was that very little of the hook could he termed "readable," as best sellers go. "Feeds and Feeding'' teemed with the driest sort of stuff on feeding experiments, to which was appended scores of pages of analytical tables, the whole being backed up with a fine index. The book was intended to he used for study and refer2285
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ence like any other handbook or encyclopedia and it was so accepted by farmers. Henry showed his readers that the correct compounding of livestock rations enabled the farmer to make his feeding operations more profitable. He made chemistry as useful to the feeder as a scoop shovel. He never strayed beyond the intelligence of his audience, and seldom led them very far from the dollar sign pointing toward the highway of profit. His clear, accurate, and terse expressions could be grasped even by simple minds, without any doubt as to what the author meant. For example, an early edition presents this summary to the discussion of the returns in human food by different animals for each 100 pounds of digestible nutrients eaten: The cow yields about 139 lb. of milk, containing 18 ib. of solid, practically all digestible. The pig produces about 25 lb. of dressed carcass. Allowing for water, bane, and gristle, there remains over 15 ib. of edible dry meat. The steer and sheep yield less than 10 lb. of dressed carcass, nearly half of which is water. Deducting this and the bone and gristle, there remains only from 2.6 to 3.2 lb. of water-free edible meat. The cow easily leads all farm animals in her power to convert the mops of the field into human food, with the pig second, poultry following, and the steer and sheep coming lowest.
Any child who had been through elementary arithmetic could understand that, and while present-day information has changed the figures somewhat, there has been no change in the fundamental relationships set forth in the last paragraph. Henry's emphasis on the practical side of chemistry won him the support of his state and laid the foundation for the brilliant chemical research work of the laboratories of the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station. I t is thus apparent that the farmer will listen to chemical stories which have a practical appeal, but they must "register" or he will pass them by. The alluringly fascinating mystery tales which come out of the chemical laboratory can be matched by the farmer out of his own experience. Can any chemist spin yarns to beat those based on the instinct for wellbeing and self-preservation which the farmer sees almost daily among the animals under his care? We have always known that few good pastures are evenly grazed by cattle. Certain portions are eaten closely before others. Chemists have recently discovered that the explanation is that there is more protein in the grass on the heavily grazed sections. The cattle knew long before the chemist learned why they preferred certain grass to others. The farmer assumed that the reason lay in the fact that the closely cropped
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grass was more nutritious. And he was right, but the farmer won't do anything for the chemist who tells him that, unless he finds something to make the information of practical value-a tip that protein added to the ration will induce cattle to graze the untouched portions of the field, or something like that. However, protein in grass is a mild story compared with the statements of the experts on beri-beri, who contend that chickens, given the choice between unpolished rice and polished rice, will always pick up the unpolished grains first, thus automatically protecting themselves against the deadly polyneuritis, which is the avian counterpart of human beriberi. And the humble porker, testing with a critical snout the cafeteria offerings set before him by his owner, puts the human expert to shame and balances his own ration as accurately as it can be done with a scale and pencil and a pad. Small wonder, then, that the farmer, observing more or less unconsciously the practical rules of chemistry transmitted to him by his forebears and displayed to him by dumb brutes, leaves most of the active thought on the subject to others. But he profits every day because some chemist has worked on his problems. And nowhere is this more a fact than in the South. No livestock feeding problem in the South surpasses in importance the question of the correct adjustment of the use of oil-bearing seeds in pork production. This is the "soft pork" problem. The highest priced hams produced in the United States come from hogs which have been fed more or less on peanuts or mast. A great deal of the fat in these seeds is soft or even liquid a t ordinary temperatures; i t retains these characteristics when i t is laid down in the tissues of the pig's body. During the curing process, much fat drips from the meat, causing i t to shrink seriously in weight. Result, price penalties when the packer buys peanut or mastfed hogs. This was purely a local southern problem until the popularity of the soy bean as a grazing feed for hogs brought the problem to the front in the corn belt and made i t of nation-wide importance. The method by which the study of the soft pork problem was approached is an important object lesson to those of us who are interested in the solution of national chemical problems. Supported by the pork producers of the country, the United States Department of Agriculture was able to obtain an appropriation from Congress more than ten years ago. With this start, the project was organized on a nation-wide scale, without duplication or working a t crosspurposes. The solution of the problem was recognized a t the very start as depending in all probability on pure research in physiological chemistry. No secret was made of this belief, which subsequent events have justified, but so far as the writer can learn, no serious objection to the cost
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of the fundamental research work involved has ever been lodged by any one connected with the appropriating functions of state or national governments. The classic instance of the utilization of cottonseed shows that chemistry has added hundreds of millions of dollars to the value of the cotton crop. In fact, some chemists claim that the seed is the more potentially valuable part of the crop, which may in time be a larger source of income to the farmer than the lint. No farmer would now dream of throwing cottonseed away, but there was a time when the cotton farmer refused to take more seed from the gin than he needed to plant the next year's crop, and laws were passed in some states to prohibit the gins from dumping cottonseed in streams. For a generation, cottonseed oil bas been a highly valued human food. Observe now Dr. David Wesson, not content with the laurels which he has already won in the cotton-oil industry, but determined to bring cottonseed meal into its own as a source of human food, and justifying his efforts with a delicious new food product made of cottonseed meal and cottonseed oil, which he calls "Wessona." Dr. Charles H. Herty has recently made the statement that there is enough protein in a 16,000,000-bale cotton crop to furnish all the protein food requirements for 53,000,000 people for a year. So we have in the cotton crop almost enough protein to supply half the needs of the people of the United States, when and if the chemists show us how this may be done. According to Dr. Herty, a pound of protein in the form of mutton chops costs $3.70. In the form of wheat flour it costs 39 cents, but in the form of cottonseed meal it costs only 5 cents. Chemists made cotton linters profitable, and this by-product of the cotton-oil industry, which a couple of decades ago was only a nuisance and a bother to the oil man, is now a highly esteemed member of the industrial raw material society for the manufacture of cellulose products. In addition to the value of the linters, cottonseed hulls may soon be in such demand for their cellulose and chemical possibilities that they will no longer be used as cattle feed. The humble peanut is being analyzed by the chemist as never before. Already a great paper company in the North is planning to grow peanuts on a large scale in the South, ship them north by water, express the oil a t the paper plant and there harden the oil into a lard substitute with the by-product hydrogen which the company bas not heretofore been able to utilize economically. Chemical products are being sought from the hulls, and the production of xylose from this source promises to develop considerable commercial possibilities. The cellulose products of the farm beckon appealingly to the chemist. The cellulosic by-products of crop production, straw, cornstalks, cotton
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stalks, bagasse, etc., usually represent many times the actual weight of the money crop produced. Who, if not the chemist, shall say the farmer shall not burn these by-products and how can the chemist expect the farmer to listen to h i , unless he shows that other means of disposal may be more profitable than burning? I t was less than ten years ago that the only use made of sugar-cane bagasse was as indifferent fuel, but the chemist has shown its value as raw material for the manufacture of insulating board, the possibilities of which are not nearly developed. The passing of the virgin pine forests of the South is being followed with developments in the utilization of sawmill and timber wastes which promise to result in time actually in the production of more building material per acre, year in and year out, decade after decade, than was realized from the virgin forests, with more stabilized and perpetual production, with far greater yields in wealth and with many more men employed than the old Southern timber industry ever knew. Southern pine trees are coming in for more attention every day. Except where virgin and good second-growth stands are being cut, the principal market for the wood is for paper manufacture-a chemical industryand the great bulk of raw material for this industry in the South comes from farms. Up until a year ago, every one thought that the use of southern pine for paper making was limited on account of the resin content of the wood. Now comes Dr. Charles H. Herty, with proof that the amount of resin in the sapwood of Southern pine is small, and that the best of all of them for turpentine production, slash pine, has no more resin in the sapwood than northern white pine or spruce. When protected from fire and hogs, southern pines will grow to pulpwood and turpentining size in 10 to 15 years from seed. Heartwood does not begin to f o m until the tree is 20 to 25 years old. The significance of these facts is momentous. If we regard pine wood as a southern farm crop, as we most assuredly must, it would seem that no crop presents greater chemical possibilities. From it we can get pulpwood, turpentine, and rosin. From the waste of the sawmills, perfect lumber is now being produced by a semi-chemical process. In 30 to 50 years, sawlogs can be grown from seed. Surely not even the cotton plant can surpass our southern pines as working material for the chemist. The great problem of the naval stores industry, much of whose production is from f a m s in the South, is to sell the rosin which is produced, and to avoid the production of more than the world's markets can absorb. For every barrel of turpentine, about four barrels of rosin are produced. Rosin is claimed, by chemists who know to be our cheapest source of organic acids, ordinary commercial grades running over 90 per cent in
abietic acid. But chemists also tell us that abietic acid has all sorts of untamed habits, such as crystallizing on the slightest provocation and misbehaving badly in other ways when introduced into polite chemical society. Who can make abietic acid behave? Fossil resins are in wide demand as raw materials for manufacture. They once were as the rosin of the naval stores market now is. How did they get that way, and if we know how, how can-thcchemist transform fresh vegetative rosin into the equivalent of fossil resin? There are many more questions which might be asked. Are not these enough?
