When the train reached Sinminfu where the railway turns abruptly eastward to cross the Liao ho to reach Mukden we saw the first extensive massing of the huge bean cakes for export, together with enormous quantities of soy beans in sacks piled along the railway and in the freight yards or loaded on cars made up in trains ready to move.  Leaving this station we passed among fields of grain looking decidedly yellow, the first indication we had seen in China of crops nitrogen-hungry and of soils markedly deficient in available nitrogen.  Beyond the next station the fields were decidedly spotted and uneven as well as yellow, recalling conditions so commonly seen at home and which had been conspicuously absent here before.  Crossing the Liao ho with its broad channel of shifting sands, the river carrying the largest volume of water we had yet seen, but the stream very low and still characteristic of the close of the dry season of semi-arid climates, we soon reached another station where the freight yards and all of the space along the tracks were piled high with bean cakes and yet the fields about were reflecting the impoverished condition of the soil through the yellow crops and their uneven growth on the fields.

Since the Japanese-Russian war the shipments of soy beans and of bean cake from Manchuria have increased enormously.  Up to this time there had been exports to the southern provinces of China where the bean cakes were used as fertilizers for the rice fields, but the new extensive markets have so raised the price that in several instances we were informed they could not then afford to use bean cake as fertilizer.  From Newchwang alone, in 1905, between January 1st and March 31st, there went abroad 2,286,000 pounds of beans and bean cake, but in 1906 the amount had increased to 4,883,000 pounds.  But a report published in the Tientsin papers as official, while we were there, stated that the value of the export of bean cake and soy beans from Dalny for the months ending March 31st had been, in 1909, only $1,635,000, gold, compared with $3,065,000 in the corresponding period of 1908, and of $5,120,000 in 1907, showing a marked decrease.

Edward C. Parker, writing from Mukden for the Review of Reviews, stated:  “The bean cake shipments from Newchwang, Dalny and Antung in 1908 amounted to 515,198 tons; beans, 239,298 tons; bean oil, 1930 tons; having a total value of $15,016,649 (U.  S. gold)”.  According to the composition of soy beans as indicated in Hopkins’ table of analyses, these shipments of beans and bean cake would remove an aggregate of 6171 tons of phosphorus, 10,097 tons of potassium, and 47,812 tons of nitrogen from Manchurian soils as the result of export for that year.  Could such a rate have been maintained during two thousand years there would have been sold from these soils 20,194,000 tons of potassium; 12,342,000 tons of phosphorus and 95,624,000 tons of nitrogen; and the phosphorus, were it thus exported, would have exceeded more than threefold all thus far produced in the United States; it would have exceeded the world’s output in 1906 more than eighteen times, even assuming that all phosphate rock mined was seventy-five per cent pure.