THE JOURNAL 



OF THE 



BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



Vol. XL No. 10. 



JANUARY, 1905. [NEW SERIES.] 



THE GROWTH OF SUGAR BEET. 



The sugar beet is only a variety of the seashore plant, 

 Beta maritima, which, by careful breeding and selection, has 

 been developed along three directions to give us the many 

 different sorts of mangolds, the edible beetroot of our gardens 

 and the sugar beet in question. 



In appearance and habit the sugar beet differs but little from 

 the mangold ; it is white fleshed, and has more of the shape of the 

 Long Red than of the Globe mangolds, but it is smaller, grows 

 more deeply in the ground with but little of the bulb exposed, 

 and develops much more fibre on the bulb and root proper than 

 does the mangold. But the main difference between sugar beet 

 and mangold lies in their composition ; for the last hundred years, 

 since the Continental blockade during the Napoleonic wars gave 

 such an impetus to the extraction of sugar from the beet, a 

 process of selecting sugar beets for seed on the basis of their 

 richness in sugar has been continuously going on, until at the 

 present time they contain 20 per cent, or more of dry matter and 

 18 per cent of sugar, while the mangold only contains about 12 

 per cent, of dry matter and 8 per cent, of sugar. 



In growing sugar beet for the manufacture of sugar, the 

 composition of the roots is all important ; the extraction pro- 

 cesses are only economical when the roots contain a high 

 proportion of sugar, and that as free as possible from the non- 

 crystallisable sugars and other soluble bodies. In consequence, 

 most beet sugar factories not only pay for their roots on a scale 

 varying with the proportion of sugar they contain, but will 

 entirely reject consignments of roots which fall below a certain 



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