Tomorrow's Harvest 347 



may grow up to wear rayon clothing made out of cornstalks, 

 husks, straw and screenings which are now the waste at the 

 grain elevators. Nearly a century ago a Czech inventor pat- 

 ented a process for making paper out of the stalks of zea mays. 

 The Austro-Hungarian monarchy was eager to find more and 

 wider uses for the American corn the peasants along the 

 Danube grew so prolifically. Cornstalk paper is of excellent 

 quality. There have been a number of attempts made in this 

 country to manufacture it and put it on sale. These have 

 failed, not because of the product, but because wood pulp is so 

 cheap that we seem to prefer wasting our forests, thereby 

 creating floods and droughts and losing thousands of acres of 

 arable land annually, to growing our books and magazines on 

 the farm. 



Besides all these, and the cornstalk wallboard which insu- 

 lates our houses and absorbs some of the noise we create, the 

 manufacture of the seven commodities listed results in a num- 

 ber of valuable by-products in the way of plastics, stock feed, 

 and carbon dioxide. The last is a left-over from the distilling 

 of corn liquor. It is recovered, compressed, and sold as "dry 

 ice." Meanwhile in South Dakota and in Kansas, distilleries 

 have been opened for the making of argol, a new commercial 

 alcohol whose source is sorghum, potatoes, corn and other 

 grains. Argol is used to step up gasoline. It promises a future 

 when motor power on the farm may be grown where it is used. 



But it is as food that corn has its widest use. Its rich store 

 of carbohydrate makes it the greatest energy-producing food 

 the earth yields. It may be that the secret of the rise of Amer- 

 ican civilization lies in the endosperm of the American corn. 



It required energy to conquer a continent and give birth to 

 a nation. It took energy to clear the forests, to penetrate the 

 Back Woods, to cross the Alleghenies, to explore thousands 

 of miles of inland rivers, to fight savages, to raise cities on the 

 prairie. That energy came from corn. Those poor Spaniards, 

 whom Peter Martyr pitied because they were forced to sub- 

 sist for five days at a time on nothing but parched corn, were 



