A Note to the Reader

You have here a report on some new developments in farm science. It contains practical information about research of the past few years pertaining to animals, plants, insects, trees, soils, water, machines, conservation, processes, marketing, industrial uses of farm products, agricultural chemistry, food, clothing, and economics. It offers a background for understanding the further results of research as they are announced from day to day. Its purpose is to help everybody to make the most of the products of the laboratory, the test plot, and the pilot plant. It is not a general or complete treatise on agriculture—a large library is needed these days to embrace all the details of the profession of farming.
This book was prepared primarily for farmers, but we have always had in mind other persons whose interests and work have to do with gardening, chemistry, beekeeping, stock raising, conservation, horticulture, housekeeping, and such. The Yearbook should be particularly useful to returning servicemen who want to farm and to persons who will find in these pages details of a product that may help them build or enlarge businesses of their own. To that end, we are as specific as we can be—in giving names of persons, places, and organizations where you can get further information if you need it.
Questions can be addressed to them or to the Office of Information, Department of Agriculture, Washington 25, D. C. In some instances, for clarity, we use trade names of products. But that should not be taken as an endorsement by the Department of the product, or preference over another product. To avoid undue preoccupation with details of organization, we usually refer to the United States Department of Agriculture merely as the Department or the Department of Agriculture; the Agricultural Research Center at Beltsville, Md., as Beltsville; and a specific bureau or laboratory or State agricultural experiment station (where the designation is clear from the context or is given in the author's note at the end of each article) as the bureau, the laboratory, the station.
The Department has 16 bureaus or major units. Among those that conduct a great deal of research in the physical sciences are the Bureau Of Plant Industry, Soils, and Agricultural Engineering; the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine; the Bureau of Animal Industry; the Bureau of Dairy Industry; the Bureau of Agricultural and Industrial Chemistry, and the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics. These units, with the Office of Experiment Stations and the Agricultural Research Center at Beltsville, comprise the Agricultural Research Administration. They have offices in Washington and Beltsville and laboratories and projects at Beltsville and in various parts of the country. Among the other units of the Department that conduct research work and contributed to this book are the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, the Forest Service, and the Soil Conservation Service.
This Yearbook is the first issued since 1942, when war interrupted a sequence that began in 1894—or earlier, if the first annual reports on agricultural matters are considered Yearbooks. The book was given its present form in 1936, under the editorship of Gove Hambidge; to him the Yearbook, as an institution, will always be beholden. An expression of thanks also is due the Congress of the United States, whose document this is, and to a number of individual Congressmen for their encouraging interest.
Science in Farming was produced in a time of rising costs and growing shortages of some materials. These we could not foresee. Several excellent articles had to be omitted at the last minute, therefore. Among them are: Improving the Cattle Range, by D. A. Savage; Growing Better Tobacco, by J. E. McMurtrey, Jr.; The Marketing of Milk, by C. J. Babcock and R. W. Bell; Making Better Cheese, by George P. Sanders; The Making of Fertilizers, by K. D. Jacob and A. L. Mehring; Rubber for War and Peace, by E. W. Brander; Sedimentation, by Carl B. Brown; Drainage of Farm Lands, by R. D. Marsden; Starch From Sweetpotatoes, by Paul R. Dawson; Science and Ice Cream, by Alan Leighton; Beef Cattle Husbandry, by Ralph W. Phillips; Plants for Special Uses, by D. M. Crooks; Pastures and Forage, by J. B. Shepherd, M. A. Hein, and R. E. Hodgson; Abaca Comes to the West, by H. T. Edwards; Seedlings From the South, by W. D. Moore, S. P. Doolittle, E. K. Vaughan, and H. Rex Thomas; Soybeans as Vegetables, by W. J. Morse; Equipment for Fumigation, by Randall Latta and H. H. Walk-den; and Farm Science in Industry, by D. S. Burch. We hope the articles can be made available in some other way to persons who have particular need for them. Many persons whose names do not appear elsewhere helped in the preparation of this Yearbook: Roy E. Miller, Charlotte L. White, Mary A. Bradley, Mabel H. Doyle, Herbert E. Goodrich, Charles M. Arthur, and Katherine A. Smith. Many of the photographs are by Charles A. Knell, William J. Forsythe, Wilfred J. Mead, and Walter A. Stenhouse. Joseph H. Stevenson and Wynne Johnson and his staff prepared the charts and drawings. On the staff of the Yearbook are Stanley H. Gaines, managing editor, and Helen E. Balaguer, assistant to the editor.

ALFRED STEFFERUD