138 The Stock Market Crash—And After 
of new uses for the former wastes of the farm, which 
used to be so hard to dispose of. Cottonseed, which 
formerly was a nuisance, is now a crop second only 
in value to the cotton fiber itself. The cellulose of 
straw is now being worked up into wallboard and 
building material. Up to the present our corn fields 
have produced only a single crop, corn, to repay the 
farmer for his toil and capital outlay. The corn- 
stalks, heretofore largely waste, are now being made 
into writing paper and other papers of excellent 
quality, while from the corncobs come furfural, 
which may supplement or supersede gasoline in our 
motor cars and gas engines. Bagasse, the waste of 
sugarcane, makes a standard wallboard. 
How revolutionary inventions for farming have 
become is seen in the new Mason Process of drying 
alfalfa. This invention permits “making hay while 
it rains” as well as while the sun shines, and makes 
practicable the growing of this main forage crop 
in the states of heavy rainfall in the East, where 
the chief dairy herds are located. It is reducing a 
dairy system from the need of devoting ten to one 
hundred acres to pasture per cow to a system whereby 
three animals can be kept in prime condition on one 
acre. In his forthcoming book, The Great Food 
Problem and Its Solution, Dr. Orrin W. Willcox, 
calculates that the earth’s population may increase 
in almost unbelievable numbers through application 
of recently discovered laws of plant growth, chemi- 
cal fertilization, and transmutation of food proper- 
ties. These, combined with selection of plants with