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But unlike Ford's U. S. raw material projects (soybeans, cotton, tung oil), his rubber plantations ran into serious trouble. Reasons: plantation trees proved susceptible to leaf diseases, competent native labor was scarce. Ford's ripening crop (production time: seven years) is not enough to put in a corner of any one U. S. rubber factory.
Another native rubber is guayule, or Mexican rubber, a dusty greyish-green desert shrub, which has preformed rubber films under its bark. In 1906 the Continental (now Intercontinental) Rubber Co., whose chief stockholders included Bernard M. Baruch and John D. Rockefeller Jr., was formed to exploit a process for extracting guayule rubber. During the rubber shortage of the '205, guayule output mushroomed to about 5,000 tons a year. Factories were opened in Texas, some 40,000 acres were put into cultivation in California's Salinas Valley. When Depression flooded world rubber markets, guayule production dropped to a mere 3,000 tons. Any attempt to mass-produce guayule today would have to start from there.
Most U. S.-produced synthetic rubbers have one or another industrial drawback. Thiokol Corp., which is now hooked up with one of the most up-&-coming newcomers to U. S. industrial big leagues, rubber-minded Dow Chemical Co., has not yet fitted its product for commercial use in tires. Du Font's neoprene has for years been accepted by U. S. industry as far superior to natural rubber for much engineering work, but its price is three times as high as natural rubber, its plant capacity not yet geared to large-tonnage production. Other rubber company synthetics (Vistanex, etc.) are partly luxury products, no answer to the strategic problem of making tires and mechanical rubber goods. Buna or Butyl tire-rubber plants, left to themselves, would take years to work out the chicken-and-egg economics of low price and mass demand. Hence, for immediate mass production of proven synthetics, Government subsidies in nine figures are probably necessary. One way to hurry down the cost is that already planned by Goodrich and others: use the synthetics at first for the tread only, where synthetics' superior resistance is most useful, thus averaging out the cost. As for Brazil and other potential rubber gardens, the assumption is that if Henry Ford could not clean up the jungle, only a concerted government effort can.