5. Legislation should be enacted to accomplish the following

urposes:

(a) Provide for a cooperative wildlife extension service between he Fish and Wildlife Service and the States so that the results of ildlife management and investigations may be brought directly to rmers and other land managers who must be depended upon to put hem into practice.

(b) Make it mandatory (if necessary by amendment of the Coorination of Wildlife Conservation Activities Act) for any Federal rency or any private agency operating under Federal permit and hich may be planning any engineering project involving impoundents or diversions of interior waters, to call upon the Fish and Wildfe Service for adequate biological studies, conclusions, and recomendations which must be incorporated in the plans before operational pproval is obtained.

(c) Provide some form of Federal control over offshore fisheries. reaties with neighboring countries, to be followed by enabling legistion, will probably be necessary.

О

Union Calendar No. 709

78TH CONGRESS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

2d Session

REPORT No. 2098

STUDY OF RUBBER IN UNITED STATES, MEXICO, AND

HAITI

JANUARY 2, 1945.-Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union and ordered to be printed

Mr. POAGE, from the Committee on Agriculture, submitted the following

REPORT

[Pursuant to H. Res. 346]

SECTION I. GENERAL

Your special subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture which, pursuant to House Resolution 346, was selected by the Honorable Hampton P. Fulmer, then chairman of the Committee on Agriculture, to study various possible sources of natural rubber from the United States, has undertaken to perform that task. We have sought to conduct our study without any unnecessary expenditure of public funds and have spent less than one-half of the $5,000 which the House made available for our use. We have, however, actually visited every important production area of natural rubber in the United States as well as visiting the guayule development in Mexico and the cryptostegia experiments in Haiti. Your committee has also observed the extraction of rubber from Russian dandelions at the Eastern Regional Agricultural Laboratory at Philadelphia. We have, in addition, visited synthetic-rubber plants and tire factories in order that we might familiarize ourselves with the problems of tire construction. We have held hearings in the guayule-producing areas of California and have invited all interested parties to appear and give their views. We have made stenographic reports of these hearings. We have personally inspected the fields of guayule in all parts of California and have visited the experimental plots in Texas from the Rio Grande River as far north as Dallas. Two members of the committee have driven down into the Big Bend region and inspected the growth and harvesting of wild guayule shrub. All

members have studied the extraction of rubber from the guayule shrub at first hand. In addition we have tried to familiarize ourselves with some of the literature on the subject including the very excellent report made to the War Department by General Eisenhower. But we have never allowed previous reports to take the place of first-hand inspection.

Natural rubber is found to some degree in a number of common plants such as goldenrod, poinsettia, and certain milkweeds, but the percentage is so low and the cost of recovery so high that none of these plants offer any prospects of commercial production under our presently known methods of extraction.

The Russian dandelion, or kok-saghyz, will grow in the United States, and it contains a reasonable percentage of very good and rather easily recoverable rubber. The Department of Agriculture has conducted experimental plantings on over 600 acres of land along the Canadian border (in summer) and in Florida (in winter). Extraction of rubber has been conducted at the Eastern Regional Laboratory at Philadelphia. Tires have been made from kok-saghyz rubber by the Goodrich Co. However, to this moment no effective method of keeping the plantings free of weeds has been developed except to dig the weeds out by hand. Due to the growth habits of the plant this has proved extremely expensive. Experimental work is continuing, and we think should continue, but at this time kok-saghyz does not seem to offer a solution to our wartime rubber needs or to hold out much prospects for a new crop. Improved culture methods might, however, change the picture.

Cryptostegia is another plant that produces a rather high percent of natural rubber. Cryptostegia is a vine that grows only in tropical or subtropical climates. It grows in California, Texas, and Florida as well as in Mexico and the West Indies. The Rubber Development Corporation has spent something like $7,000,000 in trying to develop a source of rubber from this plant. It will grow and it will produce rubber, but so far, no practicable method of extraction of the latex has been developed. The only extraction method known so far is to clip the end of each vine. When this is done, one or two drops of white juice flow out. This must be caught in a vessel. It is easy to see that the tremendous amount of hand labor incident to the collection of the latex makes this a most inefficient method of producing rubber. Until a more practical method of extraction is devised, we see no reason to look for any commercial production of cryptostegia rubber in spite of the fact that the Rubber Development Corporation has financed 43,000 acres of cryptostegia in Haiti.

On the other hand, guayule can be grown over an extensive area in the United States, the wild shrub has been processed, and rubber has been continually produced in this country since 1909 and even longer in Mexico. Guayule has been cultivated in the United States, at least on a limited scale, for the past 25 years or more. Guayule rubber is natural rubber. It is not a synthetic or a substitute. With present methods of commercial milling of guayule shrubs the resultant rubber contains from 16 to 20 percent of natural resins and insolubles. These resins can be removed and several of the guayule processors are equipped to remove the resin and do remove it whenever commercial requirements demand it. If guayule were our only source of natural rubber, it would doubtless be desirable to deresinate most of the

rubber. So long as it is only one source of natural rubber, it is not necessary to deresinate it, as there are many uses to which it can be put in its unrefined state where it serves just as well as deresinated rubber. As recently as November 21, 1944, the B. F. Goodrich Co. advised the War Production Board that "guayule is satisfactory as a 100 percent replacement for other rubber in the outer carcass plies of heavy duty, S-4 tires." The report goes on to point out that for this purpose unrefined guayule rubber performs as well as the deresinated product. In other words, there is no question but that if we had no other rubber available, we could get along very satisfactorily with guayule and synthetic rubber, whereas it is impossible at this stage of our scientific development to get along with synthetic alone. During the past 3 years many thousands of acres have been planted by the Department of Agriculture in this country and commercial companies have planted and are still planting an extensive acreage in Mexico at their own expense. A number of foreign countries have planted guayule. There is no question about our ability to grow it or to adapt it to a very large measure of mechanized culture. The process of extraction of the rubber is well understood and is relatively simple. The process is purely mechanical (unless the resin is to be removed when a simple chemical process is used). No other plant seems to hold nearly so much promise as a source of domestic production of natural rubber. This committee believes that guayule is sure to become an important American crop unless the post-war price of far-eastern rubber or of synthetic rubber or both fall to substantially lower price levels than they now occupy.

SECTION II. GUAYULE DEVELOPMENT PRIOR TO 1942

INTRODUCTION

Guayule, known botanically as Parthenium argentatum, is a stubby, widely branching, woody shrub, seldom more than 30 inches tall, with small silvery leaves that give the plant a dusty appearance. It is found growing wild on limestone slopes over an area of roughly 20,000 square miles in the dry tableland of north central Mexico and the adjacent Big Bend area of western Texas, where there is from 9 to 15 inches of rainfall a year and summers are long, hot and dry.

Rubber is stored in nearly all parts of the plant and may amount to as much as 22 percent of the dry weight of the wild shrub although the average obtained from milled wild shrub is probably somewhat less than half of this amount. Rubber accumulation begins in the first year and the annual increments increase for several years. Plants are usually sufficiently mature for harvesting at the end of the fourth year. If not harvested, a plant may continue to live for 40 or 50 years.

The North American Indians discovered the presence in guayule of the elastic substance that was later to bring it into prominance. They called it guayule (y-oo'-leh or gwy-oo'-leh) and long ago learned that its bark contained a gum which when extracted could be molded into a ball that bounced. It is said that whole communities engaged in mass chewing of the bark for the purpose of making play balls.

The first commercial experiments with guayule were carried on by the Germans who in 1900 were extracting rubber from supplies of the wild shrub shipped from the Western Hemisphere. In 1888 a New

H. Repts., 78-2, vol. 5-112