THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART V 225 



venture to say, if that many, knows anything of the Amana blanket or 

 demands it when he buys a blanket for himaelf. 



How many of us know of the wonderful development of the beet sugar 

 industry in Iowa? How many understand that it is a successful industry 

 and that Iowa might as well manufacture all of its own sugar as not? 

 It is a successful industry and now well established. Yet a few years' 

 ago, when men who had confidence in the industry promoted the factory, 

 not only were most Iowa people ignorant about what they were doing, 

 but a few of those who did know almost killed the project. Hardly had 

 the Waverly men started to manufacture sugar out of beets when some 

 man, either through misguidance or otherwise, came out with an in- 

 terview in a D'es Moines newspaper to the effect that the industry was 

 all buncomb, that the farmers were being fooled by it, and that it was 

 not adapted to the state of Iowa. As a result of that newspaper article, 

 the manager of that beet factory faced this situation: He had signed up 

 farmers to grow something like 6,000 acres of beets for the year's cam- 

 paign, but that total slumped immediately to 2,000 acres and he had hard 

 trouble to get beets from 1,500 acres. That experience came very nearly 

 being the destruction of the beet sugar industry in Waverly. It sur- 

 vived, however, and this year more than 5,000 acres of beets were success- 

 fully grown in Iowa by men who have learned how to do it and who 

 have adapted themselves to the work, and are making a profit out of it. 

 The average yield of beets in Iowa this year was something like twelve 

 tons per acre, for which the farmer got $5.00' a ton if he delivered them 

 on side track and $5.50 if he delivered them to the factory. 



Beet growers are not going to make great fortunes out of growing 

 beets, but let me tell you what one farmer did with a forty acre field 

 this past season. It cost him something like $40 an acre to produce forty 

 acres of beets that yielded about twenty tons per acre. He got $5.50 

 a ton for them. Twenty times $5.50 makes $110 per acre income. If his 

 expense was $40 per acre, you can figure his profit quite readily. 



As you go through the beet growing districts, you can recognize the 

 farms on which beets are grown by the more prosperous appearance of 

 the farming. That rule, of course, is not absolute, however, but the fact 

 is here, that the beet grower is prosperous. He will tell you now that he 

 understands it, that it has added something to his prosperity. It gives 

 him a good cash crop and beet growing fits into the rotation and helps 

 his land. Most of us are ignorant of these facts even today. 



It is customary for folks to talk about western apples as though they 

 represent the best, yet outside growers tell us that southwestern Iowa is 

 the ideal home of the Jonathan apple, and the Jonathan apple, you know, 

 cannot be beaten for all round usefulness. Every year since there has 

 been a national exhibit of apples, an Iowa man from the western or south- 

 western part of the state has carried away the highest prizes for Jona- 

 thans. Season after season the growers of Colorado, Washington and 

 Oregon have come to this annual show, determined to wrest the honors 

 from Iowa growers, but in vain. Iowa can grow Jonathan apples as can 

 no other district in the world. 

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