Farm Products and By Products for Industrial Use

Excerpt from the Foreword: Industrial use of farm products has made rapid strides in the last few years. For example, there has been a constantly increasing use of soybeans as an industrial raw material. The factory consumption of soybean oil has increased practically 10-fold since 1931. Some 200 million bushels of corn is now processed annually for the manufacture of foods, beverages, starch, oil, and other products. Cottonseed was at one time merely a waste if not a nuisance. Then processing for the recovery of cottonseed oil began. Now the cash value of the seed equals about 16 percent of the total cotton crop value. Some synthetic fibers and cellulose plastics are manufactured in large quantities from cotton linters. Acetone, butyl and other alcohols, and organic acids are made by controlled fermentation of corn. Furfural is made from waste oat hulls by processes which originated in the Department laboratories.