EXPERIMENT STATION BULLETINS. 203 



Owing to the wet harvest it was impossible to lift, top, haul and weigh these 

 plots on the same day or even in the same week. At Saginaw the beets had to lay- 

 in heaps for several weeks, the field meantime being very wet and part of the time 

 almost under water. These facts account for the discrepancies between the tests at 

 the factory and at the station. Moreover the beets were wrapped up in cloth sacks 

 and taken to the experiment station by freight, necessitating some delay and some 

 shrinkage. With the original per cent of sugar in the beets the same, the tests 

 should show higher at the college than at the factory. 



A test of varieties aims to determine which of the varieties compared gives the 

 richer beet. A farmer has but little control over the per cent of sugar in his 

 beet crop. He can neither increase nor decrease it by cultivation, by neglect, by 

 want of commercial fertilizers or by excess of commercial fertilizers, with the 

 single possible exception of the application of an excess of nitrate of soda late in 

 the season, which tends to give a large tonnage with low per cent of sugar. Where 

 he is paid for his crop according to the richness in sugar it is a matter of prime 

 importance to him that the factories furnish seed which shall produce beets with 

 high per cent of sugar, since the quality of his whole crop depends upon the 

 quality of the seed, more than upon all the rest of the factors influencing the crop 

 put together. 



That the kind and condition of the soil have a cogent influence on the quality of 

 the crop is manifest by a cursory examination of the table just given. The average 

 per cent of sugar in the beets at Holland was much higher than at either Detroit 

 or Saginaw. The soil at Holland was a very sandy loam. At Detroit It was also a 

 sandy loam, rather more alluvial than at Holland and with more humus. At 

 Saginaw it was more humic and contained a great deal more clay. Under the 

 weather conditions existing in 1903 the beets were richer on the loamy soil at Hol- 

 land. 



In 1902, also a very wet season, the average per cent of sugar in twenty-one 

 varieties was higher on the Goodnoe farm, with its stiff clay subsoil and black, 

 humic, alluvial surface soil than at either Alma, on stiff clay, or at the College, 

 on the sandy loam. (See report of Michigan Board of Agriculture, 1903, p. 185.) 

 "These findings are interesting, especially when it is remembered that the Goodnoe 

 soil was almost a muck and lay so low that it was flooded with water for the 

 entire season except in spots large enough to furnish samples for analysis, and 

 on these spots the water was so close to the surface that the beets were round 

 and turnip-shaped rather than conical." 



It would be interesting to determine which variety or varieties were best adapted 

 to the different kinds of soil used in the experiment in 1903. The foregoing table 

 gives but little light on that topic. In fact any conclusion drawn from the figures 

 in the table would be unsafe since there is little assurance that the entire plots 

 differed in richness in sugar exactly as the small samples taken from those plots 

 differ. The factory tests could not be used in this study because the beets were 

 not all drawn to the factory from the different plots on the same day. Some plots 

 had shrunken more in weight than others .when the tests were made. Until the 

 breeding of the beet seed is carried to the point where the great majority of the 

 beets grown from the seed will be uniform in sugar content and until larger 

 samples, known to fairly represent the entire crop are taken for analysis it will 

 be unsafe to draw conclusions from tabulated records of analyses. 



The yields of the several varieties as determined by the weights of the plots at 

 the factories are given in the following table. This table must be considered 

 remembering that the harvest was exceptionally wet, that the crops from adjacent 

 plots were hauled at different dates and therefore under varying conditions and 

 that some of the yields had been buried and partly frozen while others escaped 

 that hostile influence. At Saginaw, the conditions were so adverse that the yields 

 are not. given. The weights given are of clean beets, the tare out. 



