The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, June 7, 1917, Page 9

How Bolley Has Helped A Man Who Learned to “Hit the Line Hard” in His Football Days and Who Has Made Farming Easier BY E. B. FUSSELL ROFESSOR H. L. BOLLEY, dean of biology at the North Dakota Agricultural college, is a scientist, as everybody knows. True, he is different from a good many scientists, who work in their laboratories all day on abstruse problems and then write articles about them to be published in scientific magazines that are read by no one but other scientists. Professor Bolley is a botanist. The popular idea of a botanist is an elderly absent-minded gentleman who spends his time in the fields gathering wild flowers and tak- ing them home to press in a dictionary. There are a lot of botanists like that. But Bolley is different. He devotes his attention to common plants like the wheat, the flax and the potato in- stead of wild flowers. When he makes a discovery like the secret of resistant flax, how to prevent rust in wheat and scab in potatoes, he doesn't write an article to a scientific magazine about it. He writes a short, snappy letter to the farmer in the form of a bulletin, and he doesn't merely tell the.farmer what he, Bolley, discovered. He gives the farmer definite, explicit directions how to treat his seed so that he can reap the advantages of the work Bolley has done. LEARNED EARLY TO “HIT LINE HARD" Before ever Bolley got to be known as the man who saved the flax crop and the linseed oil and paint indugtries or the man who learned how to treat wheat for smut, he was known for another reason.- He was Bolley the football player before he was Bolley the scientist. This was back in the eighties at Purdue university. It was before football players used leather ‘headgear and rubber nose protectors and shin guards and padded suits. Football was a regular game for he- men then. Even after he came to the ‘A. C. in 1890 as one of the first four instructors Bolley kept on playing football with the college team, when there were hardly enough students to make up an eleven and they had to have some help from the faculty. And there is one thing he learned during his football days that he has never for- gotten since. That is to *“hit the line hard.” That is what he has been doing during more than a quarter century 'at the A. C. Sometimes it has brought ‘him into disfavor with the Big Busi- ness, like it did ten years ago when he was fighting for a pure seed law, or when he exploded the idea, carefully Inculcated by the fertilizer companies and the railroad companies who want- ed more freight, that fertilizer would help wheat to resist smut. But Bolley has hit the line hard every time, and pretty generally his views have come - to be accepted as truth. Bolley has not contented himself with sitting in his laboratory and writ- ing bulletins for farmers about his dis- coveries, either. ‘When the farmers have not seemed to be paying enough attention Bolley has sought the co- aperation of the newspapers, and if that hasn't succeeded in stirring the farmers up, Bolley has gone right out among them, with a demonstration train, when he could get one, or by auto or on foot. He is the original exponent of the idea of “Carry the truth to the people,” practicing that motto instead of preaching it. SMUT PREVENTION HIS BIGGEST WORK N Probably the most important single piece of work which Bolley has done since coming to the Agricultural col- lege has been to develop the formalde- hyde method of treating seed wheat to prevent smut. A quarter century ago Showing a group of farmers how to treat flax seed to prevent loss from flax wilt. Dakota. Thousands of gallons were used in the next two or three years by Dakota farmers alone, and a lot of other stuff that wasn’t formaldehyde. Gradually the formaldehyde method spread to every cereal growing coun- try on the globe and the manufacture of formaldehyde has toM.y in conse- quence developed into one of the major chemical manufacturing industries. It is difficult to tell what Bolley’s method has meant in dollars and cents. It has been discovered recently that besides killing the smut the formalde- hyde kills a number of other plant dis- eases which attack wheat. DBesides A scientist ready to accept everything as it is and not looking around for better ways of do- ing things would not be much of a scientist. The farmer who is content to go on forever making profits for the middleman is not much of a farmer. : smut took a terrible toll of the wheat crop of the Northwest. The best method of treatment then known was to dip the seed in hot water. This was im- practicable; it wasn’t possible under field conditions for a farmer to keep water at a certain temperature ready for the dipping of anywhere from 5,000 to 25,000 bushels of seed which had to be planted in a week to three weeks. So Bolley commenced experi- menting to develop a practical method of treatment. Finally he found that formaldehyde would 'do the trick. Formaldehyde was selling as a patent medicine at $1.75 a pint in 1896 when Bolley gave this discovery to the farmers of North doing this, it seems to act as a tonic and encourage growth. Ixperiments at the university show that while un- treated seed, for instance, will average 20 bushels to the acre, seed given the formaldehyde treatment will give 2215 bushels. But aside from the increased production is the fact that the elimina- tion of smut has enabled millions of bushels of wheat to make grades that could not have been made otherwise. FLAX CROP SAVED BY BOLLEY’S WORK Flax would be little more than a memory in the Northwest today but for Bolley's work. The flax crop of the United States used to be about 25,- 000,000 bushels. Because of decreased yvields on fields that had been planted to flax before, the production declined gradually, dropping to something like half this amount in 1909. The linseed oil men and paint manufacturers saw that their industries would bes forced out of existence wunless something happened. Meanwhile, however, Bolley had been working. Nobody knew, when he started in, why flax yields declined so sharply where the plant had been grown for a season or two, until finally no flax could be grown at all. Most people said it was because flax robbed the soil of its fertility, though one pro- fessor said it was because the old flax straw “poisoned” the soil. DBut Bolley found that neither of these reasons were correct. Land which had gotten in such condition that it couldn’t grow any flax at all would give a good crop of wheat, and land kept free of old flax straw still wouldn't grow a new crop of flax. TFinally, after countless experiments, Bolley found what he was looking for, a definite disease which was attacking the flax plant. How to kill the disease was the next question. Bolley’s studies along this line had attracted so much attention that the United States department of agriculture sent him abroad for a year to study conditions in the European flax growing countries. Bolley found that the same disease that was threat- ening to exterminate the flax industry in North Dakota was doing damage in every European flax section and that none of the European growers or scientists could stop it. It was up to Bolley to do something to meet the situation at home instead of looking for European aid. CAN NOW GROW FLAX WITH SUCCESS Experiments along the line of treat- ing the soil to kill the disease did not (Continued on page 14) Demonstration train devised by Professor Bolley to carry his pure seed propoganda to the farmers of North Dakota. Professor Bolley is speaking from the train platform. NINE 3 | ) 1l