Erwin Welte

Erwin Welte (born May 6, 1913 in Husen (Dortmund) ; † March 14, 2002 in Göttingen ) was a German agricultural chemist . He understood the agricultural science discipline of agricultural chemistry to be an interdisciplinary teaching and research area of ​​plant nutrition that is socially responsible. As a university lecturer at the Georg-August University in Göttingen , he worked on the basics of plant nutrition and fertilization, including environmentally relevant aspects of soil and water ecology and landscape design .

Stations of his life

Erwin Welte studied agriculture and natural sciences at the University of Göttingen after graduating from high school and doing agricultural teaching . In 1940 he passed the diploma exam at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences . He then completed a dissertation on the origin of red earth under Edwin Blanck at the Agricultural Chemicals and Soil Science Institute of the University of Göttingen and was awarded a doctorate in 1941. rer. nat. PhD. Years of military service and imprisonment followed .

In 1946 Welte was able to resume his scientific work at the University of Göttingen. As assistant to the agricultural chemist and soil scientist Fritz Scheffer , he worked on processes of humus formation and the importance of humus for soil fertility as well as the possibilities for the material characterization of natural and synthetic humic acids . In 1950 he completed his habilitation at the University of Göttingen with the text About the origin of humic acids and ways of their pure representation and received the Venia legendi for the fields of agricultural chemistry and soil science .

After the habilitation followed work on the elucidation of the structures of humic acids and their lack of crystallization capacity. An outstanding achievement in the field of humus research is his contribution, published in 1955 in the journal Angewandte Chemie, on an absorption spectrographic method to quantitatively determine brown and gray human acids at the same time. In 1955 he published the third edition of the textbook plant nutrition together with Fritz Scheffer (first editions 1938 and 1946).

In 1956 Welte was appointed head of the Institute for Non-Parasitic Plant Diseases of the Federal Biological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem . Here he began to work on the effects of fallout of radioactive strontium and on symptoms of nutrient deficiency and excess nutrients on plant leaves. In 1958 he entered the service of the German Potash Industry with the task of expanding and managing the central research and test institute Büntehof , which had already been re-established in Hanover, into a modern research facility focused on fertilizer technology and fertilizer application . From here he also took care of the scientific interests of the potash industry in the International Potash Institute in Bern (Switzerland) and took part in the FAO's “fertilizer program” in Rome.

After the recommendation of the Science Council of the University of Göttingen in 1965 divided the hitherto existing agrochemical and Soil Science Institute in two separate institutes of Agricultural Chemistry and Soil Science, Welte won the reputation of the Department of Agricultural Chemistry . From 1965 until his retirement in 1978 he worked here as director and full professor. During this time he redesigned his department in terms of content and structure and from 1971 set up a modern institute for agricultural chemistry with five work areas at a new location on Von-Siebold-Straße (today: Carl Sprengel-Weg 1) : Biochemical and physiological foundations of Plant nutrition, quality issues in plant production, fertilizer technology, water eutrophication and waste and sewage utilization in agriculture. This breakdown documents Welte's comprehensive understanding of science and his foresight about the goals and tasks of agricultural chemistry.

Scientific life's work

Agricultural chemistry was an elementary basic discipline and an applied science for Welte , aimed at securing and improving the existential needs of people. His research was broad. The thematic catalog of his publications includes articles on soil genesis , the formation of humus substances , the generation of energy from organic waste materials and the recycling of waste in agriculture. Questions of nutrient turnover in soils , the optimal use of fertilizers and the quality of the harvested products of agricultural crops were further focal points of his scientific activities.

A particular concern for Welte was the processing of current problems in aquatic ecology and agricultural ecochemistry . In doing so, he paid special attention to the pollution of bodies of water by wastewater from households, industry and agriculture. Even after his retirement, Welte carried out relevant research work, including a. together with the Göttingen forest scientist Rolf Zundel on a project on the effects of polluted gravel ponds on the fishery biology of the Wöltinger or Lake District near Goslar .

Welte was a committed employee in the specialist group for environmental protection, nature conservation and landscape management of the Lower Saxony Heimatbund . In several publications and in lectures he appealed to the personal responsibility of the individual to minimize environmental pollution. He called on farmers and municipal authorities to use suitable measures to redesign landscape areas polluted with pollutants so that healthy biotopes emerge.

Welte dealt with problems of agriculture in developing countries at an early stage . In several research projects he worked on the turnover of plant nutrients in soils of the tropics and subtropics. In addition, he sustainably promoted the training of scientific staff and the development of a consulting system in several tropical and subtropical countries.

Welte was heavily involved in international fertilizer science well into old age . As a long-term Vice President of the Center International des Engrais Chimiques (CIEC) (International Scientific Center of Fertilizers), he organized congresses and symposia for scientists, practitioners and fertilizer producers on current issues of fertilization, world nutrition and landscape protection and was responsible for the publication of extensive conference proceedings .

One of Weltes publications on the scientific understanding of his subject is the article Agricultural Chemistry: Assessment and Assessment of Agricultural Science in the Twilight of the Present , published in 1994 in the journal Landbauforschung Völkenrode . Welte uses numerous examples to show that drawing up nutrient balances must be a central research focus of agricultural chemistry; but in view of the increasing strain on nature and the threat to its vital resources, global problems should be given greater consideration in future research. He repeatedly called for the ecological responsibility of agricultural chemistry for a cultural landscape characterized by diverse land use . In this article, he also deals in detail with the term agricultural chemistry . He regarded the preservation of this discipline name as a matter of course not only for historical reasons, but also as a moral obligation.

Publications (selection)

• About red earth formation on Zechstein limestone and Devonian mass limestone in western Germany . Diss. Math.-nat. Fac. Univ. Göttingen 1941. Zugl. in: Chemie der Erde, Vol. 14, 1942, pp. 272-311.
• About the formation of humic acids and ways of their purification . Habil.-Schr. math.-nat. Fac. Univ. Göttingen 1950. Zugl. in: Journal for plant nutrition, fertilization, soil science, Vol. 56 (101), 1952, pp. 105-139.
• Recent results of humus research . In: Angewandte Chemie, Vol. 67, 1955, pp. 153-155.
• Fritz Scheffer, Erwin Welte: Plant nutrition. Textbook of agricultural chemistry and soil science ; Part 2, third redesigned. u. exp. Ed., Enke Verlag, Stuttgart 1955.
• E. Welte, K. Bremer, K. Müller: Cultivation and utilization of potatoes in the Federal Republic of Germany. Development, status and priority research tasks . Verlag Mann, Hildesheim 1966.
• On the issue of water pollution . In: Die Phosphorsäure, Vol. 30, 1974, pp. 121-139.
• Erwin Welte, Friedel Timmermann: Fertilizers . In: Ullmanns Enzyklopadie der technischen Chemie, 4th edition. Verlag Chemie, Weinheim 1975, pp. 203-219.
• Erwin Welte with the collaboration of Friedel Timmermann: About the nutrient input into groundwater and surface water from soil and fertilization . Evaluation of a six-year research program (1972–1978) of the Association of German Agricultural Investigations and Research Institutes. V., Darmstadt 1982 (= VDLUFA series of publications, issue 5).
• Erwin Welte, Friedel Timmermann: Fertilization and the environment . Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart / Mainz 1985 (= materials for environmental research, issue 12).
• Demands on agriculture from the point of view of nature conservation . In: New Archive for Lower Saxony, Vol. 33, 1986, pp. 136–152.
• Agricultural Chemistry: Assessment and Assessment of an Agricultural Science in the Twilight of the Present . In: Landbauforschung Völkenrode, Vol. 44, 1994, pp. 243-255.
• Erwin Welte, Rolf Zundel: Inland waters in need. On fishing water naturalization and landscape-ecological design of the gravel mining area in the Okertalaue Goslar-Vienenburg under the influence of sewage containing heavy metals. A 20-year study on water and landscape ecological research. Goltze Publishing House, Göttingen 2000.

literature

• Eberhard Przemeck: Prof. Dr. Erwin Welte on his 70th birthday . In: Journal for plant nutrition and soil science, Vol. 146, 1983, pp. 273-274 (with picture).
• Eberhard Przemeck: Erwin Welte 75 years . In: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Information No. 3 (May / June) 1988, p. 17.
• Professor Dr. Erwin Welte 80 . In: Göttinger Tageblatt of May 6, 1993 (with picture).

Web link

• Literature by and about Erwin Welte in the catalog of the German National Library