$ INDIRECT BENEFITS OF SUGAR-BEET CULTURE. 



INFLUENCE OF THE SUGAR BEET ON MODERN SCIENTIFIC AGRI- 

 CULTURE. 



THE FOUNTAIN HEAD OF INSPIRATION WHICH LED TO DEEP PLOWING, 

 SCIENTIFIC ROTATION, INCREASED FERTILIZATION, THOROUGH CUL- 

 TIVATION, AND DOUBLED THE ACREAGE YIELD OF ALL CROPS IN 



EUROPE. 



[By Truman G. Palmer.] 



The production of the food supply of human beings ever has been 

 and ever will continue to be the most important consideration of 

 man, and he who makes a given area produce a bushel and a peck 

 where it formerly produced but a bushel is a public benefactor. 



Two thousand years before the birth of modern agricultural science 

 that science had reached a high level, and the crop yields probably 

 were greater then than they are to-day. 



One hundred and fifty years before Christ, Cato the Elder, the 

 Roman statesman and patriot who tought Hannibal and Hasdrubal, 

 wrote a book on farm management, a perusal of which would en- 

 lighten the average American farmer to-day and teach him how to 

 increase the yield of his fields. 



Cato proclaimed the fundamentals of good agriculture in his De 

 Re Rustica when he said: 



What is the first principle of good agriculture? To plow well. What is the second? 

 To plow again; and the third is, to manure. 



To the farmer who kept stock, he said: 



Plan to have a big compost heap and take the best of care of manure. When it is 

 hauled out, see that it is well rotted and spread. 



And to the farmer who had no stock, he said: 



You can make manure out of litter, lupine straw, chaff, bean stalks, husks, and 

 the leaves of the ilex and oak. 



A hundred years after Cato's death, Augustus Caesar made frequent 

 mention of beets, which then were one of the principal foods for slaves, 

 while the leaves long had been used as an auxiliary fodder for stock, 

 and there are those who believe that, known by some other name, 

 beets formed an important feature in Cato's crop system, just as they 

 did after their value had been rediscovered 20 centuries later. 



People forgot Cato's teaching, and when, 2,000 years later, Napo- 

 leon Bonaparte stepped upon the stage at the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century, the worn-out soils of Europe had reached their lowest 

 ebb in productiveness, and scientists and economists were in despair 

 because of the insufficient food production to feed the ever-increasing 

 population. 



The genealogy of modern European scientific agriculture reaches 

 back to the beginning of the nineteenth century only and shows that 

 the beet-sugar industry was its father and that Napoleon Bonaparte 

 was the father of the beet-sugar industry. 



German scientists discovered the presence of sugar in the beet and 

 perfected a method of extracting it, out Napoleon Bonaparte's chem- 

 ists and economists, after 10 years of scientific research, became con- 

 vinced that by growing sugar beets on a field one year in four the 

 fertility of the soil thereby was so greatly increased that the combined 

 'yield of other crops on the same soil during the next three years was 



