FUTURE OF FARMING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 February 1940, Page 12

FUTURE OF FARMING

ALLIANCE WITH CHEMISTRY

SOLUTION or UNEMPLOYMENT AND OTHER PROCLEMS. APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC SKILL. I . A rallying cry for the application of what is called “chemurgy" to modern : life, is uttered by Dr W. J. Hale in a striking and. aggressive book. “Farmyard March." He begins on the basis that all wealth comes from the soil. He believes that the solution of both the unemployment and the farm problems lies in the application of the newer chemical skills to vegetable life and the definite and large-scale linking of agriculture to industry by making forest and field produce the’newly available products with winch industry may occupy itself. A GREAT INVENTION. On the premise that the Haber-Bosch process for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen, consummated in Germany in 1913, was the greatest invention for mankind's good of all time, the author goes on to show how varied applications of this process, and of other discoveries in agricultural chemistry to which it led. may play a leading role in an economic revolution by which nations can become self-sufficient in the large sense and a time of plenty and of broadly based prosperity be ushered in through the chemist's art. He contends that “industry can make full use of all agricultural surplus; that industry can substitute organic chemical material for practically an equal volume of presently processed inorganic or mineral, material: that industry’s j finished products, as they become more ' and more organic in composition, will surpass in quality and' efficacy their present-day counterparts of wholly inorganic composition." The three dominating factors in nature's organic cycle on the earth are termed cellulose, vegetable oil and alcohol and their congeners. Dr Hale has dubbed them the “Three Chemical Musketeers." Of Aramis, as he calls the cellulose group, he predicts that the price of cotton will be driven down to perhaps 4 cents a pound by alpha-cel-lulose from trees —grown for this harvest —selling at perhaps, 2 cents. But he also sees enormous expansion of the field of derivatives such as rayon yarn, celanese and the plastics. FUTURE BUILDING MATERIAL. “Possibly by 1965," ho says, “we shall assume that one-half of our building material will contain a. cellulose plastics base making up about one-quarter of the weight of the finished article. This would indicate a likely requirement for the building trade of about 5.000.000 tons of plastics.” Total demand, by that. year, he puts at perhaps 40,000,000 tons of cellulose material, with very material, quantities going into cheap organic glass to cover trees and gardens. Athos. Dr Hale identifies with the vegetable oils. With by-products reaching out to touch almost every human activity, such as synthetic proteins, soaps and detergents, artificial wools, silks and bristles, he expects the needs of the United States in vegetable oils to reach 10,000,000 tons by 1965. This would mean the cultivation of some 30,000.000 acres of land. To Porthos, the chemical Musketeer of alcohol, the author ascribes a mighty role. Reciting the virtues of alcohol as a muxture in fuels for internalcombustion engines, he declares that the labour requirements for “agricrude" plants and the farms which provide them with corn sufficient to supply a 10 per cent mixture for the gasoline of all our automobile engines would be from 900,000 to 1,000.000 men.

In agriculture Dr Hale finds “an endless supply of all that humanity needs for every conceivable end." There is offered here, he holds, an unbounded power for every national group. “Thus." he writes, "chemurgic nations shall grow in might .... The revelations of nature Io man give him promise of magnificent means for his own enlightenment.”