FARMWARD MARCH

This isn't at all what the title suggested to me (that is a back-to-the-farm book), but is a scientific study of agricultural chemistry and the implications for the future. There's a tremendous amount of scientific data which I found beyond me and definitely specialized, but there is so much else that it had almost a Jules Varnish quality in the tests of what the future might reveal. One feels that here is a sound plea for coordination of factory and farm for the interchangeable use of their respective products, which might ultimately solve the economic and social ills of the world. The dominating factors in nature's organic cycle are cellulose, vegetable oil and alcohol; and from the by-products of agriculture, these three factors can be made to play a dramatic and varied role. There is almost overwhelming resistance to advance, a blindness to this as an opening wedge to a solution of unemployment, and an ignorance of the important part agricultural chemistry is already playing in making nations self-sufficient. Directed to a specialized market, but fascinating.