114 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



new brands for registration, which, in a measure, accounts for the dis- 

 proportionate increase in registration fees during the year. 



During the year covered by the present report, the Department has 

 increased the scope of its fertilizer examinations with respect to a 

 point of great interest to the fertilizer user — the quality of the nitro- 

 genous ingredients in commercial fertilizers. It has, for a number 

 of years, been a matter of common knowledge that many fertilizer 

 manufacturers have been buying not only such nitrogenous materials 

 as are either directly available to the plant, or capable of prompt 

 conversion to a condition of availability in the soil, but also large 

 quantities of hair, hoof, leather, wool waste, peat and garbage tank- 

 age, which hold their nitrogen in combinations which the plants can- 

 not directly consume, and which are broken down to available condi- 

 tion in the soil with exceeding slowness. For the substances of the 

 latter group, most of them manufacturing wastes, the fertilizer 

 manufacturer pays a relatively low price, while the cost of a pound 

 of nitrogen in the substances of the better group is three to four 

 times as great as the cost of a pound of potash or of phosphoric acid 

 in forms of the highest availability. The method of analysis which 

 the Department has, for reasons of economy, heretofore required, 

 fails to distinguish the percentages contributed by these different 

 groups of ingredients. 



To enable buyers to distinguish goods containing the lower grade 

 of nitrogenous ingredients, the Fertilizer Law was amended in 1909, 

 so as to require a declaration upon the fertilizer package when 

 leather, hoof, horn, hair or wool waste is present in any form. A 

 microscopic examination of the fertilizers was provided to discover 

 these materials, if present. In no instance, however, has any pack- 

 age found by the official sampling agents borne the required declara- 

 tion, nor has the microscope in any case shown any of the specified 

 materials to be present with the exception of minute quantities of 

 hair which might normally occur in animal tankage, a high-grade 

 ingredient. 



The use, however, of these low-grade nitrogenous materials by fer- 

 tilizer manufacturers continues, as a matter of common knowledge. 

 Indeed, the manufacturers admit that such use is general; but that 

 these substances are so treated that they do not occur in the finished 

 fertilizers, but only their derivatives formed by the action of strong 

 acid upon them. For these derivatives, high plant food value is 

 claimed. The claim is, so far as the derivatives of the animal mater- 

 ials mentioned in Section 4, of the Fertilizer Act of 1909, are con- 

 cerned, but not with respect to those from peat and garbage tank- 

 age, is supported by the results of investigations made by Dr. Wil- 

 liam Frear, Chemist to the Department, at the Pennsylvania Agri- 

 cultural Experiment Station, and by Dr. Hartwell and his colleagues 

 at the Rhode Island Experiment Station, 



The fourth section of the Fertilizer Act of 1909 does not speci- 

 fically include derivatives from these low grade animal materials, 

 in its decalaration requirements. In view, however, of the relatively 

 low cost of these materials, and also of the low cost of the treatment 

 they undergo in the manufacture of the fertilizer containing their 

 derivatives, the buying public continues to demand information of 

 their presence, as a means of gauging the fairness of the prices 

 charged for the goods, a matter quite independent of their agricul- 

 tural values, - , 



