food (as in making soaps, lubricating oils, &c.) must be stopped, and
people must eat less meat, less butter, and more vegetables. Grain must
not be converted into starch. People must burn coke rather than coal,
for the coking process yields the valuable by-product of sulphate of
ammonia, one of the most valuable of fertilizers, and greatly needed by
German farmers now owing to the stoppage of imports of nitrate of soda
from Chile.

In considering how the German people may keep up their production of
food, the authors find that various factors will work against such a
result. In the first place, there is a shortage of labor, nearly all the
able-bodied young and middle-aged men in the farming districts being in
the war. There is also a scarcity of horses, some 500,000 head having
already been requisitioned for army use, and the imports of about
140,000 head (chiefly from Russia) have almost wholly ceased. The people
must therefore resort more extensively to the use of motor plows, and
the State Governments must give financial assistance to insure this
wherever necessary; and such plows on hand must be kept more steadily in
use through company ownership or rental. It may be remarked here, again,
that the Prussian Government is also assisting agricultural
organizations to buy motor plows. The supply of fertilizers has also
been cut down by the war. Nitrate has just been mentioned. The authors
recommend that the Government solve this problem by having many of the
existing electrical plants turn partly to recovering nitrogen from the
atmosphere. This, they say, could be done without reducing the present
production of electricity for ordinary purposes, since only 19 per cent.
of the effective capacity of the 2,000,000 horse power producible by the
electrical plants of Germany is actually used. The supply of phosphoric
fertilizers is also endangered through the stoppage of imports of
phosphate rock (nearly 1,000,000 tons a year) as well as the material