— 4 
tants each consuming sixty pounds per year at a cost to the 
importer of five cents per pound. It would be a great help 
to the State if this money could be kept at home, as it 
would be if sugar was made here, since after the factory is 
once built nearly all expenses are for material and labor 
produced in the State. To produce the sugar consumed by 
the inhabitants of Colorado, would require five factories of 
large size employing two hundred men each, who with their 
families would represent about four thousand people. It 
would require the growing of sugar beets on fifteen thous- 
and acres of land and add more than three hundred dollars 
to the income of each of two thousand farms. 
PROFIT. 
Are Colorado conditions such as to make the manu- 
facture of beet sugar a profitable industry? The profit of 
the industry to the factory owner, depends ultimately on 
the price for which he can sell his product. This market 
price is at present so largely dependent on political legisla- 
tion that the question at the head of this paragraph cannot 
be answered with any certainty. 
What can be said is this ; that sugar beets will grow as 
well in Colorado as any where in the world, both as regards 
their quantity per acre and richness in sugar. Moreover, 
land suitable for the growth of the beet exists in large 
bodies now under cultivation in several different parts of 
the State and this land is near to enormous deposits of coal 
and lime and but a few miles from the centers of popula- 
tion that will consume the finished product. It follows 
therefore that if prices are such as to make the business 
profitable anywhere, then it will pay in Colorado. 
GROWTH. 
The best possible climate for the growth of the sugar 
beet is that found in the section of Colorado east of the 
foothills of the Rocky Mountains and below 5,000 feet alti- 
tude. There are many valleys in western Colorado that 
have a similar climate, but the parks of the State are too 
cold for the sugar beet to be grown with profit. 
The rainfall of Colorado is too small to grow the beet 
without irrigation, so that its growth will be restricted to the 
irrigated portions, especially to the valleys of the Arkan- 
sas, the Platte, and the Grand. 
The soil best adapted to the growth of sugar beets is a 
rather firm sandy loam ; such land as is used in northern 
Colorado for growing potatoes, and in the Arkansas Valley 
