The Waterbury Democrat., 1941-09-27


 at the idea of the government pay ing @ scientist just to worry about sweet potatoes in these times, hold your raucous laughter till you have heard all. And none of your riba!d cracks, either about the disloyalty of a man named Murphy worry- ing about sweet potatoes to t5e exclusion of Irish potatoes. pr. Murphy's field of research has both varieties to bug and hoe and pro- mote.
 It's all part of the Department of Agriculture's broad program of finding new uses for surplus agri- cultural crops. While you weren't [ looking, while you had your eyes on the bathroom scales and the measurement of your hips or waist line as the sex may be, while you were watching your diet too close ly and cutting out starches, the consumption of Irish potatos dropped off 2S per cent from what 1t was 40 years ago. That meant that Q little more than one acre out of every four that used to be dedicated to the growing of pota- toes had to be planted in some- thing else, or just allowed to go to weeds.
 COTTON CHOPPED
 Also, in the last IS years, the cot- ton acreage of the country has dropped from 44.8 million acres to 23 million acres--nearly half--oe- cause Of the decline of the world market for cotton. It was to find new crops for these idle potato and cotton and other abandoned crop acres to grow that the De- partment of Agriculture got busy. And that Is where the sweet pota. to comes into It's own as the new est glamor girl of the vegetable kingdom.
 It is the sober conviction of pr. Murphy and his colleagues today that the lowly sweet potato has potentiallties for development as the corn of the south. And 1t can do things for the agricultural econs omy of the west and the Pacific coast states, too. It is Q stock feed for dairy herds and for fattenlng livestock for market. It offers a definite solution for the problem of supplying the country's demand for starches of all kinds.
 As a stock feed, the sweet potato isn't the equal of corn by volume or weight. It's about the equiva- lent Of barley. Fed raw, 1t takes about four or five bushels to do the good of one bushel of corn, but the yields of sweet potatoes Ter acre have now been stepped up so that instead of getting a mere 100 bushels to the acre, soil chemists have increased the yield to as nigh as 300 bushels.
 Also, stockmen have found that by feeding sweet potatoes with al- falfa, the rate of gain in fatten- ing animals for market is as high as 50 per cent faster than when the usual corn diet is used exclu- sively. For beef and mutton, the potatoes are fed raw. For hogs and poultry potatoes have to be cooked.
 Where the agricultural econom- lsts figure the potato stock feed comes in particularly handy IS on dairy farms. One of the principal concerns of nutritionists studying the national human health has been the under consumption 0f dairy products in the south. To get people in the rural areas of the south to drink more milk and cat more butter and cheese, 1t is nee. essary to 60 right to the beginning and figure out something for the cows to eat, so they'll give milk. Cotton seed is good stock feed, but with the reduction in cotton acre. age, the supply of cotton seed has also been reduced. The sweet potato Is one answer to that problem. WAR CHANGES THIS TOO
 Use of the sweet potato and the Irish potato as source of starch is something that has come to the fore as Q war emergency. Bulk of U. s. starch consumption has come from tapioca and casava roots imported principally from the Dutch East Indies. Latest statistics put the pre-war imports at 40 million pounds, with a domestic produc- ton of l6 million pounds.
 HIgh-grade Irish potato starches which used to be imported from Germany and Holland are now made in some 27 plants in the Maine potato country, and In the last year, this Aristook starch has been developed until 1t is winter than the best Holland Starches, and 1t brings 8 better price on the market.
 Experiments with sweet potato starches began in 1884 under the Farm Security Administration which put up pilot plant in Mis- sissippi. That plant and 6 privately owned plant in Louisiana are now going full blast. With this years crop of southern sweets estimated at 10 million bushels bigger than last years, it doesn't seem likely that therell be any acute shortages of starches for shirt fronts, yarn sizing for textile mills, sizing for paper mills, adhesives for the wood veneer, plywood and aircraft in- dustries, or even the stickum on the back of the postage stamp. 
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