New Farm Products, New Uses, and the Environment

by Claude Gifford, Office of Public Affairs, USDA, Washington, DC.

New farm products and new uses for farm products offer promising opportunities to increase the demand for U.S. farm commodities, boost farmers' income, put new economic life in rural communities, and improve the environment.

These objectives are all interrelated. They tie together into an economically viable, sustainable method of farming and farm living.

Farmers are the only ones who can and do incorporate environmentally supportive practices on farmland. To do that, farmers need a level of economic return from farming that makes it possible to incorporate and maintain environmentally desirable practices.

That sense of economic security and well-being among farmers engenders a vision of the future that encourages the adoption of long-range, environmentally desirable farm practices.

That is one way new farm products and new uses for farm products contribute significantly to environmental farming.

New farm products and new uses for farm products also increase and broaden the demand for farm commodities. They enlarge farmers' opportunities for producing high-value products. They enable farmers to rely less on producing bulk farm commodities or enjoy better returns on traditional farm commodities. All this gives farmers more diversity in production selection, crop rotations, and use of land and will make U.S. farm production more competitive, both at home and in farm export markets.

The interlocking relationships are evident: New farm products and new uses must be safe, environmentally acceptable, and profitable to produce. A more profitable agriculture supports a more environmentally responsive agriculture. And new uses for farm products can themselves be environmentally beneficial off the farm.

History of New Uses Effort. New uses is not a new idea, but the degree of action and the opportunities for success are new.

USDA's four Regional Research Laboratories in Albany, California; New Orleans, Louisiana; Peoria, Illinois; and Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania were built in 1938-41 to find new uses for farm products. A national Presidential Commission on Increased Industrial Uses of Farm Products studied new uses in 1956-57. Secretary of Agriculture Block in the early 1980's held a national conference "challenge forum" on new uses.

Predating all this was the formation of the Chemurgic Council under the leadership of Wheeler McMillen and with some financial aid from Henry Ford. The Chemurgic Council also had the support of such luminaries as inventor Thomas A. Edison, industrialist Irenee du Pont, MIT president Karl T. Compton, Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert A. Milliken of the California Institute of Technology, founder of the American Society of Farm Managers D. Howard Doane, Cornell University trustee H. E. Babcock, General Motors vice president Charles F. Kettering, and Sears, Roebuck & Company board chairman Robert E. Wood all of whom served on the Chemurgic Council Board of Governors simultaneously.

Wheeler McMillen, long-time president of the National Chemurgic Council, was also executive director of the 1956-57 Presidential Commission on new uses, and was editor-in-chief of Farm Journal. He based his reasoning for the formation of the Chemurgic Council on the concept that the human stomach, as an outlet for food production, will stretch only so far but the appetite for industrial uses of farm products can be almost without limit. The idea grew out of a comment made by Julius Barnes, a wheat exporter who was president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a speech at the American Farm Bureau Convention in Chicago in 1924, where McMillen was present.

Subsequently, McMillen wrote about the concept in Farm and Fireside, of which he was then an editor. In 1926 McMillen wrote an editorial suggesting a national foundation to stimulate the creation of new uses for farm products. He discussed the concept with William M. Jardine, Secretary of Agriculture, and Herbert E. Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce. Both reacted favorably. In the next session of Congress, the Commerce Department requested a $50,000 appropriation to investigate industrial uses for agricultural raw materials.

In 1929 Jardine wrote a foreword to a McMillen book, Too Many Farmers, relating that when he was Secretary of Agriculture, McMillen came to him and "pointed out the inelasticity of the human stomach," and "proposed a campaign for the support of research to discover and extend nonfood uses for farm-grown materials, and to find more profitable uses for farm wastes."

The Chemurgic Council, formed in 1935, had three primary aims:

"1. Development of new, nonfood uses for established farm crops.

2. Establishment of new crops for new or old uses.

3. Discovery of profitable uses for agricultural wastes and residues."

This background is covered in McMillen's book New Riches from the Soil. Those former activities on behalf of new uses laid the foundation for the present emphasis on new uses for farm products. Secretary of Agriculture Edward Madigan has made the development of new farm products and new uses for farm products one of his top priorities. There is even a greater opportunity now to be successful in producing new farm products and new uses for farm products.

Farm Capacity Is Available

The U.S. "farm plant" is running under capacity. From 60 million to 78 million acres of cropland have been idled in farm programs each of the last 5 years. New products and new uses can offer more opportunities for farmers to put this land to productive use. This would reduce Government farm program costs while increasing the per-unit efficiency of agricultural production.

About one-half of these idled acres-36 million of them are in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), withdrawn from production under 10-year contracts that start expiring in 1996. Finding new uses for those acres such as growing less soil-depleting biomass for alternative fuels would offer part of the solution for what to do with this land as it comes out from under CRP contracts.

Rural Development Promise. New uses for farm products will make new rural jobs. New uses step up the economic activity of producing, processing, transporting, and retailing new, high-value products. Much of this economic activity takes place in rural areas. Increased economic activity in rural areas broadens the rural tax base and strengthens schools and other public institutions and services in rural areas. At the same time, it reduces the pressure for urban crowding by allowing people to find jobs in rural areas.

Farm families don't live just within the borders of their farms. They live in communities of schools, churches, libraries, health services, recreational activities, businesses, and off-the-farm jobs. Profitable farming helps make more profitable, more lively, more productive rural communities that benefit farm families and rural families alike. That elevates the sense of belonging, the vision of the future, and the environmental awareness of farms and farm communities.

USDA has a national program in rural development. It recognizes that a fundamental solution to the problems of rural areas is for the rural development programs to help find new rural-based sources of income for rural communities.