New and Better Uses for Our Crops

H. T. Herrick.

Nearly all our agricultural products must be processed before they are ready for the consumer. It has always been so. The early hunter and tiller of the soil had to preserve by smoking or drying some of his food and the skins he needed for clothing. Down through the ages and well into the past century, the preparation of agricultural products for food, clothing, and shelter was mostly the problem of the individual rather than the community.

Following the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century, weaving and spinning moved out of homes into the textile mill. The preparation of leather from hides and skins was transferred to the tannery. The preservation of foods was taken over largely by factories. The development of highly mechanized industries for utilizing farm products relieved the individual of much work that once was done in the home, and it greatly. expanded the markets for agricultural commodities.

More recently, the development of a highly mechanized agriculture and the substitution of the automobile for the horse released many acres from the production of forage crops and transferred them to other crops. Many farm commodities were in surplus, and low prices caused distress.

THEN CAME THE farm chemurgic movement. In 1935 a group of industrialists, agriculturists, and scientists proposed to relieve the farmers' distress by channeling the crop surpluses into chemical industries for nonfood products. The word "chemurgy" was coined by an industrial chemist from Egyptian and Greek roots, which together mean chemistry at work. It has been accepted as a simple expression to cover a large field of chemical industry in preference to the more cumbersome "industrial utilization of the agricultural raw materials."

The group proposed to meet the situation by discovering new uses for established farm crops, developing new crops for acreages producing surpluses, and making use of agricultural residues and wastes from industries consuming agricultural materials.

Each point had significance.

New uses for established farm crops implied new products that could be made from agricultural surpluses without interfering with existing markets.

It was proposed to reduce the acreage in wheat, cotton, and other crops in surplus and use the land so released for growing new crops for industrial consumption soybeans for oil, Jerusalem artichokes and potatoes for alcohol, sweetpotatoes for starch, and so on. Such crops, if properly developed, would find their places in a balanced industrial economy.

Finally, profitable uses were to be found for crop residues and wastes, the cereal straws or corn stalks, husks, and cobs, for all of which there is a use, even if it is only to increase humus in the soil. Straw, for example, has a value to the farmer for mulching plants and bedding livestock. It can be used as a packing material or processed into pulp for strawboard. The wastes from industries processing agricultural products (such as fruit pulp, vegetable leaves, the vines and pods, and milk wastes) sometimes are a threat to community health and actually cost money for disposal. If agricultural residues and such industrial wastes can be used for finished products of higher value, the farmer's income should be increased thereby.

For many years, the Department of Agriculture had been giving attention to the utilization of agricultural materials for the manufacture of sugars and sirups, turpentine and rosin, tanning extracts, leather, paper pulp, and other products. It had also given much attention to the introduction of new and specialized crops.

The idea of laboratories specially designed for studying the utilization of certain kinds or classes of agricultural commodities stemmed from several precedents. The Citrus Byproducts Laboratory was started in Los Angeles in 1914. The Cooperative Agricultural Byproducts Laboratory was set up in Ames, Iowa, in 1934. The Cooperative United States Regional Soybean Industrial Products Laboratory was established in Urbana, Ill., in 1936.

The success attained in the various lines of that research, coupled with the interest in the farm chemurgic movement, led the Congress to include in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 a provision for the establishment of research laboratories in the four main agricultural areas of the country.

Their purpose was: "To conduct researches into and to develop new scientific, chemical, and technical uses and new and extended markets and outlets for farm commodities and products and byproducts thereof. Such research and development shall be devoted primarily to those farm commodities in which there are regular or seasonal surpluses, and their products and byproducts."

Under that authorization, four regional research laboratories were established by the Department of Agriculture in or near Peoria, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Albany, Calif. Each laboratory cost about 2 million dollars to build and equip, and has received an annual appropriation of about a million dollars for operation. They were named for their regions Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. They went to work on a limited number of farm commodities, primarily those in surplus during the 1930's. The commodity assignments were: Northern Regional Research Laboratory, cereal crops, oilseeds of the area, and agricultural residues; Southern Regional Research Laboratory, cotton, peanuts, and sweetpotatoes; Eastern Regional Research Laboratory, dairy products, tobacco, apples, white potatoes, vegetables, animal fats and oils, hides and skins, and tanning materials; Western Regional Research Laboratory, fruits, vegetables, alfalfa, wheat, and poultry products. Work on other commodities, including rice, wool, honey, and maple sirup, has since been undertaken.

WHEN THE PROGRAM of the regional laboratories was under consideration, we recognized that research in utilization could be approached from several directions. Those are: Utilization of the whole commodity; utilization of individual components; application of a particular method of research; and utilization of anything that will yield the desired end product.

I give a few examples.

The wet milling of corn is based on the whole commodity, because all the components are utilized to get these products and byproducts: Cornstarch, dextrose, corn oil, corn gluten, zein, corn steep liquor, and cattle feed. Cornstarch is used as a sizing and finishing material for textiles, as a food, and as a starting point for chemical derivatives. Corn oil is a good food oil. Corn gluten is the raw material from which zein is extracted and is also used in cattle feed. Corn steep liquor contains most of the water-soluble material of the whole grain and was formerly concentrated and added to the cattle feed. Much of it is now used as a nutrient in the production of penicillin and other antibiotics. Zein, the alcohol-soluble portion of corn gluten, can be used in varnish and in a new protein textile fiber. Cattle feed is made up of everything in the corn that is not used for special products the bran and hulls, the residue from corn germs pressed for corn oil, a part of the corn gluten, and the corn steep liquor that is not sold for other purposes.

Utilization of an entire commodity is the aim of a project at the Northern Laboratory. In that undertaking, corncobs are the raw material for the production of the following substances: Dextrose, from the cellulose in the cob; xylose and furfural, from the pentosans; and fuel, from the residue of lignin, which may also be used as a source of vanillin, plastics, and other products. Nothing should go to waste.