26 — 
irrigation which deposits the water below the soil rather than 
on its surface and tempts the beet to go deep for it. The 
writer noticed particularly at Grand Island, Nebraska, the 
past season, that nearly one-third of the weight of the beet 
was above ground, making a loss in the amount that was 
trimmed off and a poor qualit}^ in the upper inch that was 
left on the beet. 
All writers on sugar beet culture are agreed that beets 
should not be planted on ground that has recently been 
manured with stable manure, because its tendency is to make 
a large beet that is late in ripening and is low in sugar and 
purity. Sixteen persons report that they manured their beet 
ground before planting it. The crops were large as was to 
be expected, and it was also true that unless the samples 
were dug late in the season the quality is low. The stable 
manure seems to have made them late in ripening, but on 
the ripe crops, the quality is good with three exceptions. 
As these three are almost the only ripe crops that are poor 
it seems a fair conclusion that the result is due, in part at 
least, to the stable manure. Taking the results as a whole 
they indicate much more gain than loss from the addition 
of stable manure. 
One of the special advantages claimed for Colorado in 
the matter of beet raising is, that under irrigation, water can 
be kept away from the crop during the latter part of the 
season, allowing it to ripen and reach the full amount of 
sugar and purity. This is undoubtedly correct, but one 
queer sample shows that even this rule may have exceptions. 
Mrs. M. H. Lafever of Eagalite, sent a sample that was dug 
the first of October, after two weeks in which it had rained 
every day. Yet the beets tested 17 per cent sugar and 88.1 
per cent purity. 
The effect of alkali on sugar beets is still an open ques- 
tion, as is also the result of growing beets on seepage ground. 
As throwing some light on the latter question, two examples 
be quoted. At Greeley, A. L. Camp Jr., planted beets 
on some strongly alkali seepage ground and they tested 6.8 
per cent sugar and 46 per cent purity. Mr. Camp makes 
the statement that these beets were the first things he had 
found that were able to grow in the presence of so much 
alkali. E. K. Smith at Eort Eupton, grew beets on land 
kept moist by the seepage from a reservoir and his beets 
tested T4.5 per cent sugar and 80 per cent purity. Both 
raised large crops without irrigation, but in the first case 
the beets showed a large amount of second growth indicat- 
ing that there had been a time when they had suffered from 
