OTHER CHEMURGIC PROJECTS 



pieces of "strings" or ends of potatoes can be planted 

 by all farmers, and so make of the sweet potato a field 

 crop, planting early and harvesting late to make as 

 much weight as possible. 



In Georgia, and neighboring South Carolina and 

 Alabama, too, where it is impossible to make a big corn 

 crop, sweet potatoes are the best chance to grow a 

 carbohydrate feed to support the rapidly growing beef 

 and milk businesses. Again the conflict between scarcity 

 ideas and chemurgic yields had to be battled through. 



Sweet potatoes for the table trade means the nice, 

 round, smooth-skinned type that sells for eighty cents 

 a bushel up. At such prices a yield of seventy-five 

 bushels is well and good. But for feed or the industrial 

 extraction of starch, sweet potatoes must sell for twenty 

 cents a bushel. Yield per acre must be stepped up into 

 tons, six to nine tons, two or three hundred bushels or 

 more. Good looks do not count when a sweet potato is to 

 be shoved into a shredder and put through a drying 

 machine. In fact, to get ton yields exactly what is 

 needed is the big, ugly jumbos, crooked and nubbly, 

 the very kind the grocery trade disdainfully rejects. 



When you are talking sweet potatoes all the time, it 

 takes a bit of showmanship to interest the average 

 farmer in twenty cents a bushel against eighty. Those 

 substantial money prizes for one-acre plots did that 

 kind of talking. Jackson tempted Georgia farmers into 

 growing jumbos. They learned that it is less work. 



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