THE WHEAT FIELDS OF THE WORLD

Acres

1881-90             192,000,000
1890-1900           211,000,000
1900-10             242,000,000
Probable limit      300,000,000

If 300,000,000 acres can be brought under cultivation for wheat and the average yield raised to twenty bushels to the acre, that will give enough to feed a billion people if they eat six bushels a year as do the English.  Whether this maximum is correct or not there is evidently some limit to the area which has suitable soil and climate for growing wheat, so we are ultimately thrown back upon Crookes’s solution of the problem; that is, we must increase the yield per acre and this can only be done by the use of fertilizers and especially by the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen.  Crookes estimated the average yield of wheat at 12.7 bushels to the acre, which is more than it is in the new lands of the United States, Australia and Russia, but less than in Europe, where the soil is well fed.  What can be done to increase the yield may be seen from these figures: 

GAIN IN THE YIELD OF WHEAT IN BUSHELS PER ACRE

1889-90 1913

Germany              19      35
Belgium              30      35
France               17      20
United Kingdom       28      32
United States        12      15

The greatest gain was made in Germany and we see a reason for it in the fact that the German importation of Chilean saltpeter was 55,000 tons in 1880 and 747,000 tons in 1913.  In potatoes, too, Germany gets twice as big a crop from the same ground as we do, 223 bushels per acre instead of our 113 bushels.  But the United States uses on the average only 28 pounds of fertilizer per acre, while Europe uses 200.

It is clear that we cannot rely upon Chile, but make nitrates for ourselves as Germany had to in war time.  In the first chapter we considered the new methods of fixing the free nitrogen from the air.  But the fixation of nitrogen is a new business in this country and our chief reliance so far has been the coke ovens.  When coal is heated in retorts or ovens for making coke or gas a lot of ammonia comes off with the other products of decomposition and is caught in the sulfuric acid used to wash the gas as ammonium sulfate.  Our American coke-makers have been in the habit of letting this escape into the air and consequently we have been losing some 700,000 tons of ammonium salts every year, enough to keep our land rich and give us all the explosives we should need.  But now they are reforming and putting in ovens that save the by-products such as ammonia and coal tar, so in 1916 we got from this source 325,000 tons a year.

[Illustration:  Courtesy of Scientific American.

Consumption of potash for agricultural purposes in different countries]