G.I. Garden Sass

Even on barren island outposts like Ascension or Iwo Jima the G.I. had his garden sass. Hydroponics made it possible. Before World War II this scientific art of growing plants without soil in chemically treated water had been mostly Sunday supplement stuff. But the Army had read the supplements. It put hydroponics to work.

In Japan last week the Eighth Army had abuilding the largest project yet: 55 acres at Chofu, 15 miles from Tokyo on the Tawa River; 25 acres at Otsu, six miles north of Kyoto on Lake Biwa. It hoped to harvest 120,000 Ibs. (some eight servings for every U.S. soldier in Japan and Korea) of fresh vegetables a week by next spring. Reason for the project: Japanese soil has been heavily fertilized with night soil for centuries; vegetables grown in such farmland are fresh but may harbor disease-producing bacteria like the typhoid bacillus.

The Army's Japanese farms will be divided into five-acre plots, ridged with about 90 concrete growing basins. Washed gravel fills them to give anchorage for growing plants. Down the troughlike basins (they slope gently, are graduated in three broad steps) floods chemically charged water, two or three times a day. In hydroponic farming the irrigating water is loaded with soluble salts of every specific chemical needed, and thus may be superior to any natural soil, for few soils contain all the essentials for vigorous plant growth.

In charge of the Japanese farms is a tall, tanned, 38-year-old Kentucky farmer, Lieut. Colonel Ewing Elliott, head of the Army's hydroponic projects and now attached to the Eighth Army. He will use about 1,000 Japanese workers--including agricultural students--when the project this fall begins to yield its tomatoes (most successful hydroponic crop), lettuce, radishes, onions, cucumbers, peppers. Colonel Elliott thinks that the farms will not only help keep the occupation troops healthy, but may teach the Japs a valuable lesson. Only 14% of their crowded, rocky island is arable land.

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