| 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.
Courtesy of Scientific American.
Consumption of potash for agricultural purposes in different countries
Germany had a natural monopoly of potash as Chile had a natural monopoly of nitrates. The agriculture of Europe and America has been virtually dependent upon these two sources of plant foods. Now when the world was cleft in twain by the shock of August, 1914, the Allied Powers had the nitrates and the Central Powers had the potash. If Germany had not had up her sleeve a new process for making nitrates she could not long have carried on a war and doubtless would not have ventured upon it. But the outside world had no such substitute for the German potash salts and has not yet discovered one. Consequently the price of potash in the United States jumped from $40 to $400 and the cost of food went up with it. Even under the stimulus of prices ten times the normal and with chemists searching furnace crannies and bad lands the United States was able to scrape up less than 10,000 tons of potash in 1916, and this was barely enough to satisfy our needs for two weeks!
What happened to potash when the war broke out. This diagram from the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry of July, 1917, shows how the supply of potassium muriate from Germany was shut off in 1914 and how its price rose.
Yet potash compounds are as cheap as dirt. Pick up a handful of gravel and you will be able to find much of it feldspar or other mineral containing some ten per cent. of potash. Unfortunately it is in combination with silica, which is harder to break up than a trust.