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The antibiotics industry has also produced spectacular ideas. Only a few years ago, Chas. Pfizer & Co. was dumping the residue of its streptomycin fermentation vats in the Wabash River. Then Pfizer and other antibiotics companies found that the residue contained vitamin B12, a powerful growth stimulant. Once, B-12 was extracted from animal livers for humans and sold for thousands of dollars an ounce. Now Pfizer sells the B-12-rich residue cheaply to feed companies, which put it into animal rations. Merck & Co. and others have synthesized gibberellic acid, which has a powerful growth-stimulating effect on plants. Minute traces in spray will make spinach grow a second crop, and double the size of seedless grapes.
Perhaps the most imaginative of all animal researchers is J. Rockefeller Prentice, son of the chicken pioneer. Rockefeller Prentice has brought to commercial perfection the technique of quick freezing (at 320° below zero) the semen of prize beef bulls, flying it anywhere in the U.S.—or the world.
To give stock raisers the benefit of superb sires at low cost, Prentice has a bull donor service. In a pasture, one bull may cover only 20 to 35 cows a year. Prentice divides the semen, thus enables a bull to service up to 20,000 cows. He has one bull that has fathered 118,000 calves. Others long since dead are still siring calves. But he is not stopping there.
The technique of artificial insemination helps a farmer with poor herds to upbreed his herd only by slow stages. To speed the process, Prentice experimented with the technique of artificially inseminating a prize cow, surgically removing the fertilized egg, and implanting it in a scrub cow, which merely acts as a live incubator. The calf that is born is a prize animal with none of its mother's bad blood line. Scientists see a time when a farmer will buy a packet of fertilized ova, and in one year obtain from his scrub cows a herd of the finest cattle. To obtain the eggs in sufficient numbers, the donor cows would be fed hormones to make them super-ovulate. Formidable cost problems must be faced before the experimental process is commercially possible. Another big obstacle may turn out to be the purebred beef cattle associations. They already object to Prentice's selling a service of semen for $5 (plus a $5 vet's fee for injection). The associations say there is a danger slip-ups could blur purebred lines. The real reason, says Prentice, is that cattlemen want to preserve their market for high stud fees.
Fewer Farms. Where all this is leading to is obvious to farm experts. The number of farmers will steadily drop as more mechanization and automation increase the investment needed to farm. Economists of the Department of Agriculture estimate that the 3,100,000 commercial farms of 1954 may well be 2,000,000 by 1975. But they see rising prices for land and even used equipment making it easy for farmers to sell out at good prices. Those who stay in will have bigger markets. In 1940 each U.S. farmer fed himself and ten others. He now feeds 20 others. In 1975 experts expect it will be about 42. Increasing agricultural efficiency will make the job easier and more profitable.