The Birmingham age-herald., 1916-04-16
WONDER WORKING PEAT TO BE TESTED
 BY THE FARMERS OF GREAT BRITAIN

nents all over the country, One of the great advantages of this arrangement IS that we shall be able to standardize our humogen. Heretofore | have been working with a small plant at Greenford,
 near Harrow, where the small supplies of the stuff which we have turned out have been prepared from peat brought from different parts of the country, a.
 few tons from here and a ton or two
 from there. It has, therefore, been mani festly impossible to keep trace of the sources of supply in the prepared article, and so determine what class of peat Is
 most suitable. In the Manchester enter prise the peat will be all of one kind. and the various departmental and other experiments that have been arranged will be carried out with it. While some
 of the prepared article will be at the
 disposal of the Manchester corporatlon
 for their small holdings, the large propor- ton of it is, by arrangement to be re-
 served for experimental purposes on wide scale.
 "The board of agriculture and fisheries,
 in addition to watching the development in Manchester, have arranged to conduct, from scientific and practical points of view, large number of experiments at Rothamsted. The Irish board of agricui- ture have already placed their plans of experiments in the hands of the county
 instructors, each of whom is now get ting their land ready. Before the end of the present month, the Scottish board of agriculture will enter upon a series of extensive experiments up and down the country. Everywhere the keenest in- terest is being shown, and already we have received over 5000 orders for humo- gen against the time when supplies will be available. This week a question was asked in Parliament regarding the out nf hp Man anfa 1 'Bacterized peat already has been tried on some of the Prince of Wales estates, and if the Manchester experiment turns out successfully, we understand that the prince is prepared to give large order to the corporation This very afternoon, by the bye, l am to demonstrate my process to the large deputation of Rus sian journalists who are now visiting this country"
 On the chance that there may be some reader of this, whose ideas as to what
 "bacterized peat is, anyway, are as
 hay as mine were before I paid my first visit to Professor Bottomley, the thing may be explained in an untechnical fashion. As everybody knows peat bogs exist the world over, and, until now have been little better than waste land. There are vast tracts in the United States and even greater ones in Canada. Most of all, however, we connect peat with Ire
 
 the present writer, there are over thirty three thousand million tons of it In
 Ireland, of course they dry the peat and use it for fuel, but otherwise utilize it practically not at all. And while the
 worlds peat supply has thus lain idle, the search for an ideal substance with which to enrich the worlds cultivable soil has gone steadily on, ever since Adam and Eve began practicing hus- bandry in the original garden. The earths soil contains organic matter. l which scientists call "humus' that feeds vegetation and it also contains a myriad of infinitesimal creatures known as bacil which also help things along, and for years upon years tillers of the soil have experimented with animal and chemical substances susceptible of caus- 1 ing these native properties of the soil to speed up' and get busier Up to now animal manure has been the best fer tilizer known. Chemicals have been largely experimented with, but have not | produced equal results. Unfortunately, I however the world over, manure IS get 1 ting less plentiful and more costly as
 the horse is more and more largely super l seded by the motor. Particularly is this l true in Great Britain.
 ] Now there are certain microscopic bugs or bacilli, which the soil needs more than anything else to make it fertile. The | little Bacillus Radicicola, as scientists have dubbed it, which is found in the l "nodules' of leguminous plants. Plant 1 life most of all needs atmospheric nitro l gen. and the power of the little Radici- cola to fix this variety of vegetable nourishment is more pronounced than that of any other group of bacilIi and upon the number present in the soil de- pends the natural replacement of the nitrogen taken from the soil by plants and drainage. For many years the ques- tion has been how best to ''inoculate' the soil with these and other little ef- ficiency-b breeders (and the American ex. reriments along this line have been among the most valuable in resuts), but ] until Professor Bottomley made his dis covery really practicable means of do- ing this had not been found This oYs- covery was that the long-sought medium could be obtained by treating ordinary peat in laboratory, and that peat thus treated with bacteria formed a fertilizer l 20, 30, perhaps even 50 or 60 times more valuable than animal manure. There you are! This is a roughland- explana- 1 tion that doesn't pretend to be scientific 1 CT complete Another bacillus called Azotobacter figures in the cast of char acters and there is another plant food l in the professors 'bacterized peat" namely, "AuXimones," which may prove 1 to be the most valuable property of all This is now, Professor Bottomley tells
 me, being experimented with in his lab oratory with view to discovering it's 1 possibly great value as an animal food, but that is another story. It remains to I be learned from this scientists own lips | what his discovery means to the world | This question was put to him.
 | By using imagination, you can dis ! cover what it may mean to this country" | he replied. Tn Great Britain we have
 over 100000 acres of uncultivated land
 or more than the entire cultivated area
 of Holland, Belgium and Denmark, from
 whiNll countries we import so many food commodities. I don't say that all of
 this land can be placed in cultivation, l but the greater part of it undoubtedly
 can be. What this soil needs to render | it productive is a fertilizer to enrich
 it and labor to till it. The first has now
 been found in peat, of which there is an | inexhaustible supply in this country-in Yorkshire, Somersetshire and Devonshire as we'll as in Ireland, and the men will
 be forthcoming in the soldiers who will
 be discharged from the army at the end
 of the war, and to settle whom on the
 land big government scheme is at pres-
 ent being worked out. Incidentally of course, this means new industry for
 Ireland. whose vast tracts of peat now
 represent a marketable commodity.
 'Tt is hardly necessary to dwell on the
 desirabiity of increasing cultivation in
 this country" Professor Bottomley went
 on. 'It is notorious that Great Britain
 lives from day to day with margin of
 but two months between her and famine. | iS uot frua noraover thot Ep1ljrt