The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-10-23

pCOp1G O1 IIlG 1dIlO ate adequate nutritional diets, have come up with the figure that tc raise all these victualS, minimum of 321 million acres would have tc be cultivated, an increase of 10 mill lion acres.
 This admittedly is pretty "iffy' calculation, but it does indicate that all the increased food production being demanded of American farm CTS for feeding the American civil ian population, Army and Navy, and Lend-Lease is not an inflationary bubble that has to burst when the war is over. And it is another indi- cation that American agriculture can make and is making, in a few years, gains which the economic planners had thought it might take another 25 years to make.
 TERRELL
 BE CHANGES
 In the last war, there was a tre- mendous advance in the use of can- ned foods. Whole new farm indus tries and food processing industries grew out of that development, but the changes in eating habits which the nutritionists are trying to put over today call for changes far greater. Increased consumption of vegetables, of milk and dairy pro- ducts will all in time be translated to changes in agriculture.
 New processes of food handling developed in this war may have the same influence that improve ment in canning methods had in the last war. Of first importance here is the dehydrating of foods, which is growing out of the need for reduced shipping space. No one can tell where the dehydrated meat industry may go after the war.
 The same thing goes for dried milk. Millions of gallons of skim milk which used to be shipped to the hogs, may now find their way to the milk drying plants for processing into inexpensive but highly nutritional food for the lower income families which have always been milk starved.
 Eighty per cent of the agricul- trual products go ultimately into food, but it isn't just in the food crops that this wartime expansion of demanding for agriculture prod ucts is being felt. Cutting off the foreign sources of fats and oils has given vegetable oil technology tremendous boost. You see that on the farm in the increased acre. age put in soybeans and peanuts.
 The making of commercial alco- hol from grain may at last be con- ing into its own as new farm industry, result of the increased demand for alcohol for synthetic rubber.
 A BIG
 WAR BABY
 This whole business of agricul- tural chemistry, the greater use of farm products in manufactur- ing, which the chemurgy enthusi- asts have been starry-eyed about for 10 years, may become a war baby that will grow up, man-size.
 On the new crops-the growing of farm products which have here tofore not been grown commer- cially in the U. s. because there has been no demand or because they could be imported cheaper than they could be raised at home the agricultural realists are not too sure of the future. In this group are flax. plants for seed that foreign markets used supply, potato starch industry to replace cassava and tapioca. the cultiva- tion of hemp and other fibre crops, the gardening of seasonings and medicinal herbs.
 The big catch in all this de- velopment now is of course farm labor. Just when demand for farm products is up, farm population has to drop from 31 million to 29 million. It may go lower. Three years ago 24 million would have been enough. If farm economy could be developed to Support rural population of 45 million peo- pie, there wouldn't be any farm problem.