$50,000 a year, the attention of a large proportion of American farmers
was turned toward intensive farming and they began to realize the
necessity of feeding the soil that was feeding them. They grew dependent
upon these two foreign and widely separated sources of supply. In the
year before the war the United States imported a million tons of
Stassfurt salts, for which the farmers paid more than $20,000,000. Then
a declaration of American independence--the German embargo of 1915--cut
us off from Stassfurt and for five years we had to rely upon our own
resources. We have seen how Germany--shut off from Chile--solved the
nitrogen problem for her fields and munition plants. It was not so easy
for us--shut off from Germany--to solve the potash problem.

There is no more lack of potash in the rocks than there is of nitrogen
in the air, but the nitrogen is free and has only to be caught and
combined, while the potash is shut up in a granite prison from which it
is hard to get it free. It is not the percentage in the soil but the
percentage in the soil water that counts. A farmer with his potash
locked up in silicates is like the merchant who has left the key of his
safe at home in his other trousers. He may be solvent, but he cannot
meet a sight draft. It is only solvent potash that passes current.

In the days of our grandfathers we had not only national independence
but household independence. Every homestead had its own potash plant and
soap factory. The frugal housewife dumped the maple wood ashes of the
fireplace into a hollow log set up on end in the backyard. Water poured
over the ashes leached out the lye, which drained into a bucket beneath.
This gave her a solution of pearl ash or potassium carbonate whose
concentration she tested with an egg as a hydrometer. In the meantime
she had been saving up all the waste grease from the frying pan and pork
rinds from the plate and by trying out these she got her soap fat. Then