Plant Products and Chemical Fertilizers

Raw materials for agriculture are often waste products from other industries, and agricultural products again form raw materials for other industries. The following pages attempt to describe the kind of industrial waste that is used as fertilizer and transport it through soil and crops until new products for industrial use are available. Among the many plant products obtained from the soil, food has an important place as an industrial raw material, since neither humans nor horses can work without it. No special effort is made to ensure the encyclopedic completeness of the information, but the aim was to provide a fair overview of the large subject with attached bibliography for those who can continue their research. The details of analytical chemistry are not covered in this volume, unless the standard textbooks cited in the bibliography seem incomplete or inappropriate. The volume covers the entire cycle from factory to fertilizer, from fertilizer to field and again from field to factory.