1939 - Agriculture

Agriculture

London urges British farmers May 3 to plow up grazing land in order to increase domestic food production. Britain has reduced her dependence on imported food through subsidies to farmers and marketing schemes, but she remains the largest buyer of food in the world market, absorbing 40 percent of all food sold in international trade.

Germany has stockpiles of 8.5 million tons of grain as World War II begins. Berlin accuses London of having airlifted Colorado potato beetles onto German fields.

DDT halts an invasion of Colorado potato beetles, whose depredations threaten Switzerland's potato crop. Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, 40, of the Geigy Co. has taken the low-cost hydrocarbon pesticide synthesized by chemistry student Othmar Zeidler in 1873 and developed it into an insecticide that is far more effective and persistent than anything previously known (see 1943; medicine [typhus], 1944; Osborne, 1948; Carson, 1962).

Japanese beetles menace crops in much of the United States (see 1916).

The drought on the southern plains that has persisted since 1931 finally ends; abundant rainfall produces bumper wheat crops.

Nearly 25 percent of Americans are still on the land, but the average farm family has a cash income of only $1,000 per year.

Harvard plant geneticists Paul C. (Christoph) Mangelsdorf, 40, and R. G. Reeves show that Zea Mays originated from wild maize when winds blew the seeds north to the highlands of Mexico, where they mated with the wild grass Tripsachum, known to the Mexicans as teosinte, or God's grass. The two flourished side by side for centuries before they mated, and from that cross came Zea Mays, which is grown in many varieties—elf corn by the Mexicans for use in tortillas, northern flint corn for cornmeal, dent corn for Southern spoon bread, sweet corn (see 1779), and various hybrids (see Mangelsdorf, 1941).

Russia's August 23 nonaggression treaty obliges her to supply Germany with 1 million tons of wheat per year and expedite delivery of Manchurian soybeans.