Norwich Bulletin Newspaper, December 25, 1916, Page 9

Federal Horticultural Board Exercises Strict Quarantine Over Insect Pests in Klants, Diseased Potatoes, - Trees and Shrubs—Danger in Cot- ton — Nursery Stock — Flowers — Personnel . of the Board. Special Correspondence Yooy ‘WASHINGTON, iD. C., LTHOUGH it may seem ridicu- lous to spend thousands of dol- lars annually to prevent one little moth egg that could pass through the eve of a cambric needle from entering the country, the machin- ery of the Departments of Agriculture, State, Treasuty and Post @ffice are co- operating to keep out th®t little pest, the pink cotton boll-worm. The same agencies are united: to ex- clude by quarantine diseased potatoes, t¥ees, shrubs and plants, an®in so do- ing are aécomplishing far more. than one would think toward holding down *he cost of liviig. The “general stam” which conducts the defense #gainst plant disease is known as. the federal horticultural board and is composed of five high offi- clals of appropriate buréaus of the De- partment of Agriculture. All along the fertile valley Nile, where the luxuriant ¥gyptian cot-| ton grows, planters are more worried over the ruinous work of the pink boll- worm in; their cotton fields than they are over ‘the greater devastation of the European war. In the consternation caused by the loss of a fifth of their orop they -have thrown up the’bartiers and are exclud- ing all foreign cotton—an unnecessary measure against the pest, with its life cycle of destruction §o fifmly in posses- sion of their fields; but directed against iny further insect invaders. The pink boll-worm was taken .to Egypt from India, where its wretched family billions are still leaving their baleful impress. The tiny egg is deposited by the mother moth upon the growing plant leaf, which becomes the food of the larvae, emerging in ten days from the egg. Thence it éats its way into the heart of the gotton boll, where in this destructive stage it spends about twen- ty days, until full grown, when it is nearl; 1f an inch long. It been. feeding upon the cotton peeds . and when about to transform ihto the pupa and become a moth again it occupies the hull, from which it has dévoured the kernel. The worm’s pink- ish color and-its place of living have glven it the name “pink boll-worm.” * ’ * % In about two weeks more the moth emetges, 4 fragile insect about three- quarters of an inch in expanse, now a graylsh brown color with darker splotches. In three or four -days. it deposits its eggs and Jives ten days or ; more; doing harm all its life and leav- * Ihg behind it a multiplied evil suc- cession. While the annual yleld of American Sea Island cotton, the best in the world, is by no means enough to make all the #pool cotton, automobile tires and other textiles requirmg a grade hetter than that of ordinary upland cotton, it is somewhat, surprisifig to learn that 300,- 000 bales ‘of Egvptian cotton contam- inated by the pink boll-worm are im- ported with fmpunity to- the United States. This was maede possible by a sys- tem of fumigation originated by the board and worked out on a commercial seale by its gxperts, by which every bale is disinfected before distributfon. The cottons—a couple of hundred bales at a timie—1s placed in a great horizontal cylinder of heavy structural hermetically sealed and then the umped out until there is almost um within. Hydrocyanic acid a v ®as is then admitted, and although the . bales are compressed before shipment | until they are almost as hard as blocks eeping Out of wood, it penetrates.the cotton so that all animal life, including boll- worms in-every stage, becomes extinct in less than an hour and the cotton can be sent without possibility of spreading infection to any mill for manufacture. x * % There are only: four of thess fumi- gating tanks in the country, one at each of the four ports of entry for cot- ton—New York, Newark, N. J.; Boston and San Francisco. They are under private ownership a are run as a business propositién, a charge being made for each bale of cotton sterilized. The plant at Newark was built for its owner’s accommodation by one of the great manufacturers located there, as he uses vast quantities of the Egyptian product in making spool cotton. Although privately operated, these tanks are under the closest_ of gov- ernment inspection. The bales must be left in the receiving chambers a certain time; the polsonous gas must be of a positive strength; the appli- ances and chemicals tested and every precaution must be taken to evacuate the gas without risk of life to the men operating the plant. One shipment of the infested cottofl seed—and it is beHeyed to be the only one—is known to have entered this country, and that was before the quar- antine was established. This lot was taken to Arizona, where a state quar- antine was in force; the infestation was detected and the whole lot burned. It is believed that the pink pest has not succeeded in running the blockade. Since July, 1913, the board has quar- antined all cotton seed from foreign countries, and has intercepted several lots, all found to be infested with the pink boll-worm. One of the most pressing matters now under the board’s attention is the over- sight of potatoes coming inte the coun- try to make up the 60,000,000-bushel shortage in the American crop. * * * Naturally, our Canadian neighbor wishes to share in the high prices, and his crop is wanted here; but the yoard says: “No diseased Stock may be entered.” Accordingly, this working plan has been agreed upon between the two countrie: nada may send potatoes free from pests to ports of entry designated by this country. On arrival the tubers are examined by federal inspectors, and if found to be infected are‘ returned jurious disease and insect| MINIATURE VACUUM DISINFECTING TANK IN THE EXFLcisBNTAL LABORATONY; COMMERCIAL TANKS ANE THE FEDERAL HORTICULTURAL BOARD. HUNTER, GEORGE B. SUDWORTH, WILLIAM A. ORTON, REUBEN C. ALTHOUSE, SECRETARY. LEFT TO RIGHT—CHARLES L. MARLATT, CHAIRMAN; WALTER D. KARL F. KELLERMAN, ALSO A MEMBER, NOT PRESENT WHEN PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN. to the consignors at their expense. Po- tatoes are coming into the country in such quantities that, although in the main they are all right, carloads are sent back almost every day. A disease known as potato wart or canker having broken out in Great Britain, Germany and Austro-Hungary, the department issued its proclama- tion forbidding absolutely the impor- tation of potatoes from. other coun- tries. Another thing which the board is fighting the importation of any nursery stock which carries the white pine blister rust, a. tree diséase de- structive of both ornamental and for- est pines. This blight may be carried by all five- leaved pines from Europe, Asia, Canada and Newfoundland and all gooseberries and currants from:Canada. Their im- portation is absolutely prohibited. Cotton seed, except from seme parts of Mexico; the seed of alligator ‘pears from Mexico and Central America, liv- ing canes of sugar, all citrous nursery stock (oranges, lemons, etc.), all In- dian corn or maize from oriental coun- tries and some less important plant products may not be imported at all, because each is likely to carry some disease which thus far has not broken out in our native plants. This rule is just as reasonable as it is to pre- vent the landing of passengers from some port known to be full of such in- fectious dicease as the bubonic plague. These plant quarantines cover the BUILT AFTER THIS MODEL. stock found in certain localities or|of the department, near the east mfi certain diseased plants, but the aver= sight of the board is extended to regu- late the entry of all woody and gertaifi other plants and seeds imported. * * % Nearly all European and seme other foreign countries maintain a rigid ind spection mervice o6f their nursery stock, and importations from those places are allowed on permits issued to the importer by the department of agricul- ture, This involves a certificate by the foreign inspection service that the plants are free from disease and insect pests, Whereupon they are admitted through the customhouses, and may be sent to any state in the Union. The plants, however, are not free for delivery, for nearly every state main- tains an inspection service which calls for the examination® of all imported seéeds and plants. The results of the inspection are reported by the state examiners to the board, together with the actlon, which in case of serious pest or disease is the destruction of the plants. ‘This state inspection is generally very thorough, and may be enforced by the board, if not kept up to the stand- ard, by establishing a quarantine against the products of that state. No importations of seeds or plants are permitted from countries which do not maintain an inspection service, except in very small quantities for experi- mental purposes, and then the board will grant a special permit upon which, after satisfactory federal they may be entered. = * * Formerly many seeds and plants, samples of cotton and the like, were sent in through the mails—a very con- venient way for all concerned. The board, however, has, with regret, abol- ished it, because it is impossible to in- spect the packages in the mail; an@ no matter how careful the senders were, the contents were liable to carry infec- tions. If the senders were careless, the danger was very great. ton seeds sent through the mails were found to be contaminated as high as 20 per cent with the pink boll-worm. Even for a total abstainer, a physi- clan may order an exception for the patient’s good, and there is one excep- tion to this mailing order. Seeds and plants may be sent to the Department of Agricuiture; for in that case they are examined by experts, and if dis- eased are at once cremated. The board maintains on the grounds inspeetion, ; Egyptian cot- | a small laboratory, whi nts of all kinds are taken. It ton- aing a minlature disinfeeting tank, and is a most valuable adjunct. act creating the board previded that it should consist of five -mena to be designatsd by the Beeretary Agriculture, and they should serve without additional pay. The Secretary appoinited as its chair- man, Mr. Charles L. Marlatt of fhe bu- reau of ethnology; Willlam vice chairman, of the bereau of plant industry; George B. Sudworth of the forest sefvice, Walter D. Hunter of ethnology and Karl F. Kellerman, also of plant indun(rg, the other three mem- bers. Mr. Reuben C. Althouse was named as secretary of the board, and upon his shoulders and his assistants fall the details of the office and the execution of the directions of tie board. * * % The effectiveness of the various quiase antines, the satisfactory disinfecting of cotton, the agreements with foreign dountries on especial subjects, the clos- ing of the foreign markets against plants, seeds and samples have not been attained without mature thoughf and action by the board; nor without co- operation on the part of the fedéral de- partments—the Treasury, through its customhouses; the Post Office; the In- terior, through the bureau of stand- ards, ‘and the State, through its con- ular offices; nor has the plant inspec- tion service of the states been lacking. At first the restrictions were very em- barrassing to the importers, but the board has recognized their troubles, and they, in turn, appreciating the rea- sonableness of the demands, have ac- cepted the situation, and with few ex- ceptions are very willing to render all possible assistance In excluding any- thing which will injure the country's interest. That this is not a small thing these figures from nursery stock importations tell: For the year énded June 30, 1614 (before the war), there were imported 7,880,000- fruit trees (6,690,000 from France), 14,630,000 fruit tree stocks, nearly 2,000,009 rosebushes, 1,600,000 or- namental trees, 842,000 coniferous trees, besides many other plant trees not mentioned here. One diseased lot means an Injury to an entire community, one pest, like the pink boll-worm, may deestroy a staple crop, and the thin line of defense against these possible invaders is that created by the committes with the un- wieldly name, “federal horticultural board.” ‘United States Must Preserve Nitrates or Be at an Enemy’s Mercy « - Nitrates Necessary in Making - of Smokeless Powder and ,High Ex- plosives =~ In: Case of War Uhited States Might Be Denied’. Shipments _From Chile—The Rem- edy a Plant to Fix the Nitrogem. of the Atmos- p here — Congressional Appropgiation of Twenty Millions- for a Fixation® Plant—A Talk With a National Authority on Production of Nitrates. Special Correspondence WASHINGTON, D. C., HOULD war come to the United States, and the powder and ex- plosives now on hand—and they will not last long against a pow- erful enemy—are exhausted, the army, if there be any, would have to fall Pack -upon. the black powder of the eivil war. The country would be utterly at the meréy of the invader,” because there would be no nitrates with which to make smokeless powder and high ex- pjosives. The first care of an enemy strong enough to make a landing would be to stop the shipping of nitrates (saltpeter) from Chiles . t‘* The military experts and tha scientific vodles organized for preparedhiess have seen this danger, and the last Congress, in alarm, appropriated $20,000,000 to crect, it the President. so .decides, a plant to fix the nit@gen of the atmos- phere, that from the Very elément which sustains life may be talen the substance which is death’s instrument in Europe. . More power for a fixation plant which will turn out in the form of ammonia enough nitrate for use in. war is re- quired than that furnished by the con- solidated waters of the great lakes tumbling over Niagara. The cost of operating such a plant is enormous; nevertheless it must be met, unless some better way of securing the indis- pensable nitrates can be found. At the instance. of the War Depart- ment, Director Van H. Manning of the bureau of mines has considered it well worth while to dispatch the. bureau’s DR. J. W. TURRENTINE, Chemical engineer, Department of Agrieulture. (Photo by Harris & Ewing.) chief chemist, Charles L. Parsons, to Europe to investigate how the warring nations secure nitrates for their ex- plosives. In spite of the quantities of ex- plosives used on the thousand miles of battle-front, less saltpeter from Chile is passing through the Panama canal to the alies than did during the first year of the war, and the sclentists have found out the reason. Dr. Pargons is now in London, and he expects to visit France, Italy, Nor- way and Sweden. He is not going to see what the allies are doing, but w they are doing it, for he knows that they get most of their nitrates by using nests of by-product ovens, which save thousands of tons of nitrates otherwise wasted in making many mil- lion tons of coke from soft coal. The Germans, however, cut off from foreign nitrates, have augmented their supply by erecting a fixation plant said to turn out ammonia at the rate of 140,000 tons a year. = * * It is generally supposed that Ger- many, before the war, obtained most of the ammonia nsed for explosives from Chile, and that nearly all the nitrates which canfe as a by-product from coal were used to make fertilizer. Owing to the relatively small farming area of that country, high cultivation Is necessary to make the ground yield crops that will feed the population while the blockade continues. But all the nitrates had to be used to manufacture cannon food, and there was none left for the crops of 1915; that is why they fell off. The fixation plant filleq the deficit; that is why the erops of 1916 have been plentiful. To obtain an accurate statement of the nitrate situation recourse has been had to one of the experts of the De- partment of Agriculture, Dr. J. W. Turrentine, one of the national au- thorities on the production of nitrates, although he is more interested in see- ing it used for agricuulture than for war. His training and his study of methods and apparatus have made a chemical engineer, rather than a iaboratory chemist, out of him. He has Studied all known sources of nitrates, and has told how to obtain from domestic sources an ample supply.for all pur- poses; namely, by the oxidation of ammonia produced as a by-product in the process of coking bituminous coal. “If one starts a fire of soft coal in an open grate,” said he, “at first col- ored gases are given out; the coal turns a dull black and settles into a mass. That mass is coke—soft coal Yithout thé sases and volatile mat- er. “The gases, which here are the im- portant thing, contain ammonia, ben- zol, toluol, coal tar and other valu- able things, which may be recovered as by-products from the coking proc- ess. “Coking soft coal frees it from these gases, gives it many of’ the desimable qualities of anthracitgsand is a pre-re- auisite for 1ts use in e blast farnace in the reduction of iron ore. The mistake must not be made, however, of sup- posing that coke is only valuable for making iron and steel, for as a matter of fact the potential energy of soft coal A NEST OF BY-PRODUCT COKING OVENS. BY THEIR USE THE GAS FROM THE COAL MAY BE CONVERTED INTO NITRATES. is Increased by approximately 20 per cent by utilizing the gas and the coke separately. “In this country during the past year about 75,000,000 tons of soft coal were converted into 55,000,000 tons of coke at a loss of the greater part of the difterence between these quantities. “One of the craziest processes of na- tional waste has been that of letting the gases in coke-making ‘go_up in smoke’ from the old-fashioned beehive oven; for thereby during the past twenty years by-products of the value of hundreds of millions of dollars have been wasted. “The primitive method of making coke was to dump into an oven, from its shape called a ‘beehive,’ a charge of three tons or so of coal and burn it with restricted air until the gases were driven out of the oven tép and wholly lost. The first step taken toward economy was to conduct enough of this escaping gas in_ the adjacent beehive to warm up its charge of coal. “Although Germay, England and France have been using them a long time, it was not until a few years ago that American engineers introduced here by-product ovens by which all the gas given oft in the coking operation is conveyed to tanks or hoiders, such 188 may be séen at any municipal gas plants and thence utilized. “The by-products from these gases consist of coal tar, from which the ?ermnnn make the valuable aniline yes * and. which is largely used for road building. “From this gas American manufae- turers also get a supply of illuminat- .ing and fuel gas sufficient to supply large communities, and they are actual- 1y doing that very thing in several parts of the country. They extract benzol (56,000,000 gallons in 1916), a substitute for gasoline, only more PoOw- erful, anu tuluol, which, in connection with nitric acid, is used to form the much-dreaded trinitrotoluol, the ex- plosive charge used in projectiles. * P “But the by-product of the most in- terest to us is ammonia, which When oxidized under the proper conditions gives the indispensable nitric acid for explosives, and, after treatment with sulphuric acid, produces the sulphate ammonia of the fertilizer. Thus from the coke oven we get nitric acid and benzol, the two essentials of the most diabolical explosives known. “While statistics are uninteresting, they are the shortest way and, there- fore, the best of telling some facts, 50 I am using these figures to Show the growth of the coking industry and the relative growth of the by-product recovery of ammonia; also the uses of ammonia for commercial purposes. “In 1900 the annual ammonia produc- tion of the United States by the coking process, expressed in_tons of sulphate of ammonia, was 18,800 tons (3,400 tons of nitrogen); in 1915 it was 220,000, and the estimates for 1918 and 1917, based upon Dby-product ovens erected and ordered are, respectively, 234,000 and 376,000 tons. But this repre~ sents the ammonia product of less than one-third of the soft coal coked annually for the manufacture of 1 Apply- ing this, as in an emergeéncy, the gov- ernment could do, to all coal coked would result in more than 1,000,000 tons a year. * * * “Phe coal which is coked, however, represents but a small portion of the soft coal used annually; and if 'there is such a demand for ammonia as to create. a market, ‘good business’ will insist upon the coking of as much of this coal as may be required, for the coke has nearly all the fuel cepacity which the coal had and is freed frem the gas which makes its use unde- rable in many places on account of irt and smoke under combustion and ses which make it unsuitable for ousehold and other uses. “In war emergency the government could take over' this entire production; it would prohibit the use of raw soft coal, or take other measures to compel the coking of all soft coal before final consumption. In taking this course it would be procuring quantities of behzol and toluol. In S0 doing it would only be enforcing a scheme for econamy in the use of the great but not fmex- haustible natural product—coal. “At present it takes about 100,000 tons of nitrogen, egdivalent to 400,000 of ammonia sulphate, to supply the fertilizer trade, about 40,000 tons of which areiderived from the coking of coal, and the rest (80,000) from animal tankages, bone carbonization and the cottonseed meal industry. “Practically all the nitrates used in the United States in high explosives for purpose of peace and for war are imported from Chile; and until the price of domestic ammonia 1s reduced by a more abundant supply their fm- portation may be expected. But in event of war of such character that Chilean shipments be stopped, there are ample quantities of nitrogen avail- able from Soft coal, lignites, and even peat, to make all the explosives that could possibly be needed. * * % “If there should not, particularly at the outset, be enough nitrates for mu- nitions and for fertillzer toé, it must be borne fn mind that little fertilizer is used by the American farmer in raising the staple articles—wheat, corn, rye, oats, hay and cottos. | “The gas that may be made from coking coal in the by-product oven is a large and cheap source of power when used with gas engines. It can be generated wherever wanted and ap- plied to industrial use. In emergency this power can be converted into eleo- trical power for the fixation of nitro- gen from the atmosphere, as the Gere mans, in their peculiar situation, have found necessary, or for running munie tion factorfe: *% have not attempted in this infor- mal talk to detail the various processes or to discuss elaborately the costs and quantities of <coal, coke, ammonium, steel, rate of ammunition eonsumption, or the many other ftems which are in- volved in supplying the country with nitrates in times of peace and of war. “But 1 haye studied the subject suf- ficiently to satisfy myself, and I be- lieve 1 have given facts enmough to show that the coal-coking by-products oven will produte all the nitrates Fhich may be needed in time of peace for agriculturel purposes, and- that if war should befall and foreign supplies hecome avallable, they ¢ould be made in such emergency to increase their output amply to '“”3 munition fac- tories to any desir extent, even through a war protractéd mahy years.”