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
from which to make sulphuric acid; also, through the reduction in the
production of the iron furnaces of the country, from the slag of which
over 2,000,000 tons of so-called Thomas phosphate flour was produced,
will involve a big reduction in the make of that valuable fertilizer.
Thus, there is a lack of horses, of fertilizers, and of the guiding hand
of man. This last, however, can be partly supplied by utilizing for farm
work such of the prisoners of war as come from the farm. As Germany now
holds considerably more than 600,000 prisoners, it can draw many farm
laborers from among them. Prisoners are already used in large numbers in
recovering moorland for agricultural purposes.

This latter remark suggests one of the recommendations of the authors
for increasing agricultural production--the increased recovery of
moorlands. They show that Germany has at least 52,000 square miles (more
than 33,000,000 acres) of moors convertible into good arable land,
which, with proper fertilizing, can be made at once richly productive;
they yield particularly large crops of grain and potatoes. Moreover, the
State Governments must undertake the division of large landed estates
among small proprietor