OCR Text |
Show A Plan to Protect Agriculture After This War For years the tragic results of the expansion of food-producing acreage during World War I has haunted American agriculture. Every farmer, farm-er, as a matter of patriotism, interrupted inter-rupted his rotation of crops to produce pro-duce food and more food for our armies and our Allies. Now again in World War II, to feed our soldiers and our Allies and to serve the special spe-cial demands of war industry, we are dislocating our normal production produc-tion as a matter of patriotic service. It seems plain that by the end of this war American farms will have created a tremendous surplus production pro-duction power which ordinary peacetime peace-time requirements will not absorb. By the end of 1942 our overall average increase production over the average for the last 10 years will be more than 21 per cent. How then can American agriculture side-step a post-war farm tragedy even worse than that following World War I? Experiments in Rubber and Other Products. Our Government is now experimenting experi-menting with domestic sources for rubber. Some sixty thousand acres are devoted to the production of guayule and its possibilities as a source of domestic rubber. Emergency Emer-gency plants for the production of thousands of tons of synthetic rubber rub-ber from oil and alcohol are now springing into production. We have learned how to make paper pa-per from slash pine and starch from potatoes. We are learning how to raise medicinal herbs which we formerly for-merly imported. Denied the use of kapok which we imported from the East Indies and used in life preservers, we have discovered dis-covered that the floss from milkweed milk-weed makes better life preservers than kapok ever did. Factories have been built and several thousand acres are now devoted to raising milkweed intensively. Already we are producing tung oil successfully. Thousands of acres will be needed before we can supply even our present domestic market-Luckily, market-Luckily, we have at hand the National Na-tional Farm Chemurgic Council, an organization of research chemists chem-ists from our several industries who compare notes and gain new enthusiasm in the research for new uses of old crops and new crops which can be cultivated in America. Our government has established regional re-gional research laboratories. More than fifteen thousand different differ-ent kinds of plants grow in the natural nat-ural state in the United States. We use less than three hundred of these plants. Farm chemurgy will not be complete, nor the post-war problem of agriculture solved until every plant is re-examined in the light of modern science and made to serve its part in contributing to the comfort, com-fort, happiness and security of our America of the future. A Plan That Deserves Support. The United States Senate is considering con-sidering a plan which will require the use of 20 per cent of war profits during the war for the purchase of Recovery Bonds by each company in order to have available the necessary nec-essary cash to quickly change their business and industrial plants back to peace-time activities at the close of the war and to adjust the employment em-ployment of their noimal number of factory workers. This percentage of war profits could also be used in a broad plan of research by industrial chemists to develop new uses for products of the farm by our domestic industry. If our industry has the knowledge and the money in hand to convert an all-out war effort to peacetime production, maintain employment and launch the new products discovered discov-ered by science, we have a reasonable reason-able chance to absorb our farm surplus sur-plus even in the post-war period. Depression hit our rural areas longer and harder than our industrial indus-trial areas. Our hope for the security, securi-ty, happiness and prosperity of Rural Rur-al America is at stake. If we can develop this practical plan for taking tak-ing care of our surplus in the after war period, we can go forward unafraid un-afraid in an all-out production effort for the winning of this war and in providing the food necessary, for starving people in the after war period. pe-riod. . We will know that we have provided an ever-expanding America Amer-ica with new crops and new uses. Worth thinking about. |