TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART X 507 



me that his beet tops from twenty acres have saved him nearly one hun- 

 dred dollars this year. Mr. Ray took care of his beet tops by piling them 

 up in small piles as fast as the "beets were hauled and in this way he 

 saved every top. Mr. Ray has grown oats and corn after beets; he says 

 the yield of both were much better after beets than they were after any 

 other crop. Earl Ferris had twenty acres of oats this year after beets; 

 Charles H. Scantlebury had seventeen acres of oats after beets and Frank 

 J. Scantlebury had thirty acres of oats after beets. These gentlemen tell 

 me they had the best oats and the largest yield they ever had on their 

 farms and they give the beets the credit for this big yield. This is an- 

 other profit from the beet crop. Then another profit from the beet crop 

 is that after the beets are harvested your land is clean and plowed for 

 the next years crop. All you have to do is sow your oats and disc them in. 

 One has only to look at the land where beets were grown this year to 

 convince himself that this ground is worth several dollars more for next 

 years crop than where corn or potatoes were grown. 



Truman G. Palmer, secretary of the American Beet Sugar association, 

 had this to say to the farmers in his address at the Commercial Congress 

 at Denver, Colorado, August 17th, 1909. "Why sugar beets help the land." 

 "In plowing for grain, we usually turn the soil over to a depth of five to 

 six inches, but more often five. Beneath the soil we turn over, the ground 

 is so hard the grain roots will not penetrate it and consequently all the 

 nutriment our crops receive is drawn from the five to six inches of top 

 soil. The general conception of a sugar beet is that it is one large root, 

 but this is erroneous. In addition to the main root there are a multitude 

 of small, fibrous roots which nourish the main one. These fibrous roots 

 go down as deep as the earth is stirred and sometimes even deeper. The 

 main or top root will go to a depth of four to five feet. When the main 

 roots are plowed up in the fall, these fihrous roots are broken off in the 

 ground, and, in rotting add humus to the lower strata of the soil, also 

 leaving the minute roots to the full depth that they have penetrated. When 

 other crops follow beets, the roots instead of going down only to the 

 depth of the plowing, find the little enriched interstices left by the de- 

 cayed minute beet roots and following them on down they draw nutri- 

 ment from twelve inches of soil instead of from six inches of soil. In 

 other words, the culture of beets doubles the soil without adding to the 

 acreage. You will observe that while all of the long fi'brous roots, from 

 the size of a pin to double the diameter of a knitting needle, have broken 

 off, many of them still are from one to two feet in length. When dried, 

 the fibrous roots attached to each beet perhaps will weigh only one to 

 two ounces, possibly even less than an ounce. If they average but three- 

 quarters of an ounce to the beet, they carry down into the under strata 

 of soil over one ton of humus per acre. Is it any w'onder that such won- 

 derful results are obtained through rotating other crops with sugar beets? 

 How much money do you suppose it would cost to purchase a ton of de- 

 cayed vegetable matter and distribute it evenly over an acre of ground 

 and then iDury it to a depth of six to fourteen inches, where it is most 

 needed? Such an operation on a field of any size would bankrupt any or- 

 dinary farmer, yet this is just what the culture of sugar beets does for our 



