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Chapter 12

Chemistry in Agriculture

As Missouri State Chemist and head of the Experiment Station Chemical Laboratories, Charles worked on expanding research.

“My driving goals were to solve major problems of analytical chemistry, to make work easier for everybody concerned and to advance the research of the professors in the College of Agriculture,” said Charles. This dictum would become a relentless mantra for him.

But first he had to solve the problems facing the Experiment Station.

In 1949, when Charles came on board, the Experiment Station lab was almost hopelessly backlogged. The results for fertilizer samples brought in during the fall weren’t ready until spring, making them almost worthless to farmers and not much better for manufacturers.

“It was unacceptable,” said Charles.

The problem stemmed from the fact that while agriculture had changed, the methods for fertilizer testing hadn’t—at least not yet.

Established in 1903, the Experiment Station stemmed from the 1893 passage of the “Act to Prevent Fraud in the Manufacture and Sale of Commercial Fertilizers.” The law was basically a truth-in-labeling law and required testing of all fertilizers to ensure they contained the exact percentages manufacturers claimed they did in terms of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and other chemicals. The Experiment Station was in charge of administering the law, testing fertilizers and limestone and reporting on the results.

For nearly half a century, all had gone well. The state of Missouri had a competent, third-party laboratory to conduct the chemical tests, and MU had a laboratory on campus, which brought in funds. It also employed people, including chemists, field agents who collected the samples, and administrators who kept the operation on track, reporting the results to the manufacturers and the state.

Following World War II, agricultural practices changed, and use of fertilizers increased. As more fertilizer was being sold, the number of fertilizer samples coming into the Experiment Station skyrocketed.

The testing methods of fertilizers hadn’t evolved much since the founding of the Experiment Station nearly fifty years earlier, in 1903. Charles said when he took over the Experiment Station, the chemists on staff were good and the methods they were using were reliable, but many of the processes were slow and laborious and dated from 1884.

When Charles came on board, chemists were conducting twenty-four to forty-eight manual analyses a week. However, by 1949, roughly ten thousand fertilizer samples a year were flooding into the Experiment Station for testing, and each sample had to be tested for several chemicals, including nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

Testing ten thousand samples actually meant the lab’s chemists had to run thirty thousand or more analytical tests a year. In addition, if a test result came back with any discrepancy, the test had to be repeated by another chemist to make sure the original chemist hadn’t made an error.

Finally, while more and more samples were coming into the Experiment Station for testing, there was no way to speed up the testing process, given the methods in use at the time.

Charles couldn’t simply come in and force his chemists to work faster or use different methods for testing. In order for tests to be considered acceptable and reliable, the testing method had to be approved by an accrediting organization such as the Association of Official Agriculture Chemists, now known as the AOAC International.

All the methods approved at the time called for slow, manual wet chemical processes, which could not be hurried. For example, titrimetry, one of the methods of analysis, involved placing the sample into a solution and then slowly adding a reactant, usually a standardized acid or base, until a reaction, a colorimetric end point, occurred and it changed color. This color change is known as a colorimetric end point.

Another procedure in use at the Experiment Station when Charles took over was called gravimetric analysis, which involved making a solution of the sample and precipitating it so it could be filtered, washed, dried, and weighed. The process takes time.

For some of the tests, ingredients had to be added in a certain order or in a specific way; otherwise, in some cases, the chemicals would explode.

Charles’s goal was to find better ways of selecting out of a sample a specific chemical so it could be measured accurately, quickly, and definitely. Much later, Charles would find himself searching not just for a specific chemical but for the building blocks of life and amino acids. Eventually his work would allow him to say without a shred of doubt that there is no life on the moon, with confidence at the level of one part per billion—something so small it is nearly invisible to the naked eye, down to the size of less than a dot on a piece of paper, said Charles.

But in 1949 the chemists at the Experiment Station had to use the chemical testing processes available then, which meant they had to perform the same tasks repeated over and over while remaining vigilant and alert.

“It was absolutely boring, mindless work. It was terrible. It was like cooking dinner for five thousand people and trying to make it one plate at a time,” said Charles. They needed a paradigm shift in chemical analysis, and Charles was just the man to help make it happen.

The chemistry at the time wasn’t just boring and time consuming; it could also be dangerous.

The threat of an explosion was real, as Floyd Kaiser, one of Charles’s graduate students during the 1960s, learned first hand. A door was blown off a refrigerator one night after someone stored in it a flask containing diazomethane, a highly explosive chemical used to analyze pesticides. During the night, some of the diazomethane fumes escaped from the flask and an explosion blew the door off the refrigerator, hurling it to the other end of the lab. The explosion took place after hours, so no one was hurt, said Kaiser, but he recalled that Charles gave the staff a firm reminder about the about the importance of safety—and replaced the refrigerator with an explosion-proof model. The dangers of those times kept everyone in the laboratory on their toes, said Kaiser.

A Money Maker

While the work at the Experiment Station could be tedious as well as dangerous, the lab had one major redeeming feature: It made money.

In addition to covering the costs of the testing program, the fees generated by the Experiment Station brought in about $500,000 a year, an amount which increased to roughly $1 million a year by the time Charles retired in late 1987 and $1.4 million by the time he died.

The law called for any extra income to fund additional research for the benefit of farmers and agriculture. The legislators couldn’t have done better if they had written the law with Charles in mind: a money maker that called for him to help farmers and others. At last, he had a job that fit him like a glove. It would be a job he’d hold for nearly four decades.

All he had to do was streamline the process.

A New Lab

But first, Charles had one other task before him: designing a new seven-thousand-square-foot laboratory for the Experiment Station. The station had outgrown its space in Schweitzer Hall, a 1912 building named after the MU Department of Chemistry’s first full-time professor, and was scheduled to move to a new building on Hitt Street, in the center of MU’s campus.

Years later, the Experiment Station would be encircled by a new addition, creating the Agriculture Building that Charles called “Sad Sam’s Slab Lab” and a story he loved to retell. In 1961, the Dean of the College of Agriculture Sam Shirkey wanted to build the addition, but when it came to funding, he had to choose between air conditioning and windows because there wasn’t enough money for both. He, as Charles’s apt description shows, opted for air conditioning, resulting in a flat, windowless building, which now surrounds the Experiment Station.

Despite the addition, by the time of his death in 2009, more than half a century later, Charles’s design, layout, and organization of the lab remained much the same as it did when he created the lab’s interior orientation. Of course, since then there has been an amazing influx of several generations of new equipment, which improved the productivity of the lab during Charles’s tenure as well as after, a process he’d stoked throughout his career at the Experiment Station.

As Charles worked to streamline and improve operations at the Experiment Station, he was a driven man and not above stepping on a few toes, which almost cost him his job at one point. “It wasn’t all a bed of roses,” said Charles.

After a few years as head of the Experiment Station, Charles fired a few of the low-performing chemists, attempting to clear the laboratory of what he considered deadwood. Then one of the other professors at the College of Agriculture decided he would appoint a chemist to fill one of the vacancies in the Experiment Station’s staff and Charles refused to tolerate what he saw as the overstepping of boundaries.

The firings and the dispute between Charles and the other professor reached the ears of the dean, who then began to think of replacing Charles, until another professor stepped in and convinced the dean the changes Charles was making were much needed and he should keep Charles on board. It wouldn’t be long before the dean would be glad he’d kept Charles on staff.