Hawaii - James Michener [612]
In desperation, Hoxworth Hale suggested: "We know we're being attacked either by some invisible virus or by some chemical deficiency. It doesn't seem to be the former. Therefore, it's got to be the latter. I am willing to spray-feed every plant in the islands. But what with?"
A young chemist from Yale suggested: "We know the complete chemical component of the pineapple plant. Let's mix a spray which contains everything that might possibly be lacking. We'll shoot blind. At the same time, you fellows compare by analysis a hundred dead plants with a hundred unaffected ones. Maybe you can spot the deficiency."
The young man mixed a fantastic brew, a little of everything, and sprayed one of the dying fields. Almost as if by magic the hungry plants absorbed some tiny, unspecified element in the concoction, and within two days were both upright and back to proper color. It was one of the most dramatic recoveries in the history of pineapple culture, and that night for the first time in several months Hoxworth Hale slept peacefully. In the morning his board asked him, "What was it that saved the crop?"
"Nobody knows. Now we're going to find out."
He encouraged the scientists, who withheld from the magic brew one component after another, but the fields responded dramatically no matter what was sprayed on them; and then one day zinc was omitted, and that day the plants continued to die.
"Zinc!" Hale shouted. "Who the hell ever heard of adding zinc to pineapple soils?"
Nobody had, but over the years the constant leaching of the soil and the introduction of chemical fertilizers had minutely depleted the zinc, whose presence to begin with no one was aware of, and when the critical moment was reached, the zinc-starved plants collapsed. "What other chemicals may be approaching the danger line?" Hale asked.
"We don't know," the scientists replied, but prudence warned him that if zinc had imperceptibly fled from the fields, other trace minerals must be doing so too, and he launched what became perhaps the most sophisticated development in the entire history of agriculture: "We are going to consider our famous red soil of Hawaii as a bank. From it we draw enormous supplies of things like calcium and nitrate and iron, and those are easy to replace. But we also seem to draw constant if minute supplies of things like zinc, and we haven't been putting them back. Starting today, I want the chemical components of every scrap of material harvested from our pineapple fields analyzed and their total weight calculated. If we take out a ton of nitrate, we'll put a ton back. And if we withdraw one-millionth of a gram of zinc, we're going to put the same amount back. This marvelous soil is our bank. Never again will we overdraw our account."
It was strange what depletions the scientists found: zinc, titanium, boron, cobalt, and many others. They were present in the soil only in traces, but if one vanished, the pineapple plants perished; and one night when balance had been restored to the vast plantations, and the economy of Hawaii saved, Hoxworth Hale, who had refused to surrender either to nematodes or to the depletion of trace minerals, suddenly had a vision of Hawaii as a great pineapple field: no man could say out of hand what contributions the Filipino or the Korean or the Norwegian had made, but if anyone stole from Hawaii those things which the tiniest component added to the society, perhaps the human pineapples would begin to perish, too. For a long time Hale stood at the edge of his fields, contemplating this new concept, and after that he viewed people like Filipinos and Portuguese in an entirely different light. "What vital thing do they add that keeps our society healthy?" he often wondered.
When Hong Kong Kee had served on various boards