236 The Sugar-Beet in America 
value of the farms studied in this survey were above the 
ordinary beet land is seen from the fact that the yields 
reported average in the neighborhood of one-third 
higher than the yields for states as reported from other 
sources.! 
In addition to the rental cost, there should be added 
from 3 to 10 per cent of the costs mentioned for taxes, 
depreciation on machinery, and other incidentals. Then 
about 6 or 7 per cent of the cost as given should be added 
to account for crop failures or acreages not harvested, 
if the true cost is to be found. Keeping this in mind when 
studying the gross returns from the crop and the yield to 
the acre represented in columns two and three of the chart, 
it will be seen that beets on the better class of land in 
most of the states yield a profit under normal conditions. 
It is evident, however, that the true net returns are not 
so great as one is sometimes led to believe from incom- 
plete costs. The cost data are not complete enough to 
draw satisfactory conclusions, because we do not know 
whether the land represented in the high-producing states 
— Utah, Idaho, California, and Colorado — was on the 
200- to 300-dollar-an-acre land that rents for fifteen to 
twenty dollars an acre each year, or whether the low- 
producing states represented the 100- to 200-dollar-an- 
acre land drawing a rent of six to ten dollars an acre. 
But it appears that the profit to the acre from the crop 
increases rather strikingly as the yield increases above a 
minimum point. The larger yields in the West permit 
more care to be given economically to the crop as the 
yield increases; or rather, the high wages and other 
1U. 8S. Dept. of Agri. Yearbook (1913), p. 447. 
