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Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2580, 14 August 1909, Page 4

WORLD'S BREAD SUPPLY. In recent years we have become moro and more familiar with restricted supplies in the wheat market and prices of flour and bread the world over have risen appreciably. The question of the future of the world’s bread supply is much more serious than is commonly supposed, and it is only by a mere general application of scientific knowledge that the problem is likely to be solved. Statisticians calculate that by 1935 if all the land in the civilised world available for wheat-growing be planted, the yield per acre must be increased from 12.7 to 20 bushels to meet the demand, which would mean the using up of all -the Chilian stocks of nitrates in four years. The price of this article has risen £2 per ton to £l-0 7s since 1900, and there are used to-day about 1,730,000 tons yearly, and the most favorable estimate only gives 120,000,000 tons left in Chili. At the Congress of Applied Chemistry held in London in June, Professor Berithsen lectured on the fixation of atmospheric * nitrogen, quite the most popular and informative address ever delivered on this subject. He explained the frenzied race which chemists have been running those last fifty years to prevent a catastrophe which would be destructive to the human race. For fifty years tlievworld has been living on capital. Farmers have been draining from the soil the essential nitrates which alone make possible the life of the plants. The wheat and the foodstuffs, are built; up year by year out of tho nitrates stored in the ground, and slowly added to by such agencies as thunderstorms'. As agriculture lias been becoming more and more intense, the. nitrates from the soil have been exhausted .far more rapidly than nature and natural manures-hav« been able to make good the loss.

The first alarm note that caught tho public ear was the speech of Sir W. Crookes, in. 1897, in which ho called attention to the coming scarcity and possible starvation of mankind, from that time scientists have been working double tido3, and by, 1903 Birkeland and Eyde, at Notodden, in Norway, had brought their theories to practice, and were producing air-made nitrates by using a disc-shaped arc-flame 6ft in diameter, through which the air was blown. One Otto Schonherr, in 1905, after eight years’ work, succeeded in producing nitrates (or “air-saltpetre,” as he called it) from tho air by a much simpler process. Companies were formed to work the two systems, and these have now amalgamated, with a capital of 34,000,000 kroner. After water power has been arranged for and works built, the company. will -be able to put 100,Uud tons of air-saltpetre' on the market yearly. This, of course, is touching a practically illimitable supply and tho process now discovered should in the future solve the problem of tho world’s bread supply.