Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 June 1916 — MAY INCREASE CROP VALUES WITH FERTILIZERS MADE FROM THE AIR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MAY INCREASE CROP VALUES WITH FERTILIZERS MADE FROM THE AIR

THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DAM AND POWER PLANT AT KEOKUK AND THE MAN WHO BUILT IT.

By HUGH L. COOPER,

Builder of the Keokuk Dam.

American farmers are going to school. 1 They are learning that farming is a I manufacturing business; that every garden, farm, orchard and ranch is a chemical laboratory. The chemists are the agricultural schoolmasters of today. The virgin soil contains certain ele- • merits which furnish plant food and grow crops. As these elements are taken from the soil by cropping year after year, its productivity’ diminishes ' and the crops fall off. Every intelligent farmer knows nowadays what these vital elements are and in what proportion they must l>e restored to the soil to keep up his crop yields and make his business pay. With farmer and manufacturer alike the present day problem is to secure an adequate supply of necessary raw materials and labor at prices that will give him a profit on his finished product. The war, for instance, has shut off our potash supply from Germany, and the government experts are almost ■ hysterically seeking to devise processes for converting seaweed into potash or : making available the immense supply | of this salt locked up in the common rocks of our hills and mountains and scattered broadcast over the earth. Earth'a Vast Cemetery. The most important of the plant foods, though, and the most costly, is the nitrogen, which is vital not only to : plant life, but to all forms of life. We commonly think of oxygen as the life giving element, but the scientists tell us that were the supply of nitrogen cut off the w hole of the earth would soon , become a vast cemetery. So lavishly has nature supplied us with nitrogen that four-fifths of the atmosphere is composed of this element Agriculturally we must supply nitrogeneous plant food in the form of ammonia. Through countless ages a very small part of the nitrogen in the air has been made into ainmonia, deposit ed in the soil by lightning and other natural processes. It is this tiny deposit of ammonia or nitrous acid which gives the virgin soil its plant building properties. These deposits, however, are so small that additional means must lie found of changing the form of air nitrogen and putting back into the earth the ammonia consumed by plant life if the soil is to remain fertile.

’ ers have been obliged to resort for plant food. Only three other sources of nitrogen supply are known. At present and for many years past the world’s greatest supply has been saltpeter or nitrate of soda from the deserts of Chile, where in the course of past ages nature has impregnated great beds of soda with atmospheric nitrogen. Until a few years ago the whole civilized world depended upon these Chilean nitrate deposits for its supply of saltpeter, nitric acid and ammonia. Today the United States relies mainly upon this source, and American manufacturers and farmers pay tribute to the Chilean government, which collects an export duty of 60 per cent on the product, to the tune of upward of $12,000,000 a year. Even at this cost the Chilean supply is giving out, and we must face the prospect of still higher prices. The total export of saltpeter in 1860 was 70.000 tons. In 1915 it was nearly 2,(J00,(MX) tons. Robert Kennedy Duncan, late professor of chemistry in the

University of Kansas, says the best deposits of saltpetre in Chile will be exhausted by 1925. Then what are we to do for ammonia and nitric acid? In the process of coking- coal some ammonia is obtained as a byproduct, but this Is only adrop in the bucket as compared with our national needs, and to burn coal primarily for the production of ammonia means a fuel waste and cost that is unthinkable. Nitrogen From the Air. From where, then, is our future supply to come? Science has answered the question, as it answers most questions. Other civilized nations more progressive than we have accepted the aid of science and freed themselves from the Chilean monopoly, saved their coal, increased their supplj- of fixed nitrogen and reduced its cost by harnessing their watt. powers, converting into electricity the energy in flowing waters and using this cheap electricity to burn the oxygen out of the air and change the free atmospheric nitrogen into forms of acids and compounds available for chemical, manufacturing and agricultural uses.

The supply of nitrogen in the air is inexhaustible so far as it can be expressed in human terms. Above each acre of land on the continent there are 34,000 tons of nitric acid in the form of free nitrogen. Europe is using 1,400,000 horsepower of hydroelectricity to capture this nitric acid from the air. Germany is waging war with gunpowder made from the atmosphere and furnishing agricultural fertilizers to her farmers at one-half the price paid by the American farmer.

Tlie processes of animal digestion fix some part of the nitrogen consumed by the body in the form of ammonia valuable as plant food. It is these processes which give stable manure its lertilizing qualities.

For many years we brought guano from Peru ami supplied our ammonial soil needs from the deposits of bird droppings accumulated there through countless ages. These Peruvian deposits are exhausted, and while there are similar deposits in several parts of the earth they are so remote and inaccessible as to be practically unavailable.

The astounding thing in the United States today is that we do not wake up and take advantage of our opportunities. Our natural resources, the richest in the world, are largely neglected. Of our water powers, which compare favorably with those of any other country, we are using only 10 per cent. It is said that only 5 per cent of our agricultural lands are productive. A Waste of Two Billions. In comparison with the enormous development and use of water powers in Europe not a single large hydroelectric plant has been built in the United States for several years. Not one electrochemical plant has been established in this country. Not an ounce of atmospheric nitrogen ifj being produced within our borders. In the last ten years we have, by neglecting our water powers, destroyed and wasted more than $2,000,000,000 worth of fuel and labor that could have been saved.

City sewage and garbage waste, very much of which is.'carelessly drained into the streams and pi-eiin. contain valuable fertilizing qualities because of its ammonial content. In our desperate need for nitrogeneotis fertilizers we are extravagantly using millions of tons a year of cottonseed meal for fertilizer manufacturing. Because of the high cost of cliemigal fertilizers, farmers in many sections find their use unprofitable and are obliged to lose the use of their land during frequent seasons, planting it in clovers, cowpeas and other plants of the small family of legumes which have the property of extracting nitrogen from the air, converting it into nitrates and leaving these in the soil in the form of small nodules or pimples which form on the roots. Costly Makeshifts. These are some of the cumbersome and costly makeshifts to which farm-

The only reason the United States is so far behind other civilized countries in this respect is that the federal government controls the use of our best water powers, and for nearly ten years, under a mistaken conception of con-

serration, they have been locked out of use by inadequate laws. American capital and investors have sought to develop the water powers and establish the new industries dependent upon cheap power, which would make us free of the Chilean monopoly, but the laws have said "No.” To Induce investment in these industries investors must have assurance of reasonable security and some hope of fair return or profit, and the laws deny either the security or hope of return. To no class of American citizens does this situation come home so closely, perhaps, as to the farmers. There is absolutely no relief in sight from the high prices of fertilizers or for fertilizers at all, except through development of cheap water powers. Not only does the water power question affect the future of fertilizer sup ply and prices, but it is closely related to the labor question. For several years farm labor has been increasingly expensive and hard to secure. Immigration has stopped and is not likely to be resumed for years or generations to come. Europe will need all the men she has, left after the war. Conservation of American labor means abolishment of unnecessary work and the re leasing of workmen for better occupations. Our Undeveloped Water Power. The United States figures show that there is now undeveloped in this country about 35,000.000 horsepower of water power. To develop and use even half of this means conserving the labor of 300,000 men now employed in coal mining. If applied to furnish jower for present uses it would relieve the railroads of the United States of the necessity of transporting more than 110.000,000 tons of coal a year, most of it for their own use. Electrification of the railroads means better and cheaper transportation. To bring 300,000 men from the bowels of the earth and put them to work in the sunshine, in factories and on the farms, means not only a new supply of farm and manufacturing labor, but bettering the condition of these men and making this country a better place to live in from every human point of view. But to get these results, to get any development and use of water power we first must have federal legislation that w’ill open the water powers to use. The United States senate the other day passed the Shields bill by a vote of 46 to 22. This measure gives water power companies the right under careful restrictions to dam navigable streams and .build power plants therein. A bill providing for leasing of power sites in the public domain has passed the house and is now being debated in the senate. Certain men and interests are trying to defeat the purpose of this constructive and beneficial legislation by loading it up with unworkable terms and conditions. They are making charges and statements, generally vague and containing more innuendo than argument, intended to create suspicion and mistrust and preveiifcj’egislation. It behooves the American manufacturer, the American farmer, the American citizen who has any direct, indirect or patriotic interest in this subject to study this legislation for himself and arrive at his own conclusions. A Suggestion to Citizens. Instead of taking the opinion of somebody- else 1 urge every interested citizen to write to his congressman in Washington for copies of the Shields bill and the Myers bill and read them carefully, thoroughly, impartially and critically. After reading these’ measures and making up his mind as to their merits, 1 urge him to write his representative in congress exactly what he thinks of them, demanding their passage if he thinks them good bills, and their defeat if be thinks them bad bills.