USES OF LAND 165 



diagonally from the North Sea to South Central Russia. It has 

 also appeared in the United States, mainly in Colorado, California 

 and Michigan. The area under sugar beet has averaged about 

 6 million acres in Europe in recent years, with a much smaller area 

 of about J million acres in North America. The total acreage is 

 thus small compared with that devoted to wheat or even to 

 potatoes, but the crop is exacting and requires first-class land and 

 an abundance of suitable fertilisers. Sugar beet also require 

 careful cultivation and considerable human labour for harvesting, 

 and must therefore be regarded as competing directly with other 

 forms of agriculture for both land and labour. Moreover, since 

 beet sugar is produced in countries that are well adapted to animal 

 industries, and in most cases have developed these industries 

 extensively, its production appears to offer competition to the pro- 

 duction of meat and dairy produce. As a general rule, experience 

 in Europe shows that the spread of sugar beet cultivation has 

 driven animal raising to some extent, and cereal cultivation to a 

 greater extent, to other, and generally poorer, land. The growing 

 demand for cereals and the protective policy of European countries 

 have caused cereal production to be maintained, but animal in- 

 dustries of the pastoral type have suffered, because the net result 

 of the whole change has been that pastures have been diminished 

 in area. On the other hand, animal industries have often been 

 able to maintain themselves in areas especially devoted to sugar 

 beet cultivation, but in a new form. Instead of pasture grasses 

 their principal rations consist of beet pulp combined with straw 

 and concentrated feedstuffs of local production or imported. In 

 Denmark, Holland, Southern Sweden and parts of Germany animal 

 industries have constantly advanced with the increase in sugar 

 beet cultivation. 1 However, in the case of the first three of these, 

 at any rate, the production of cereals and of concentrated feed- 

 stuffs has been largely driven overseas, since they have come to 

 import an increasing part of their requirements of these products. 

 The pulp returned from sugar factories is a valuable feed material 

 since it is available throughout the winter as succulent matter 

 necessary to supplement the rations of concentrated feedstuffs 

 and hay for stock, thus taking the place of such root crops as man- 

 golds and turnips commonly used in Great Britain. The beet 

 sugar production of Europe in 1912-13 was over 8 million tons, 

 and the amount of pulp available must have been over 40 million 

 tons, though by no means the whole of this was utilised as stock 

 feed. From this point of view the cultivation of sugar beet forms a 

 basis for intensive animal industries leading especially to the 

 production of beef, veal and dairy produce ; and so far as the 

 result is to increase the output of butter, it indirectly favours 



1 Sugar beet have been found valuable as a rotation crop in an intensive 

 arable system of cultivation. Cf. (Cd. 8305), pp. 37-41. 



