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Creek. The factory water supply comes from this source 
and from four artesian wells in its yards. The water is 
fairly pure and contains but little alkali. The artesian 
water is the purer. The population of Lehi is some 2,500; 
altitude about 4,535 feet; annual rainfall reported to aver- 
age some 14 inches. 
In 1896 about 74 per cent of the beets came to the fac- 
tory by rail, and 70 per cent, in this way in 1897. The min- 
imum car rate on beets is $7.00, or 35 cents per ton, where 
20 tons are loaded in a car. This rate extends to Payson, 
35 miles, making there i cent per ton per mile. 
'From Springville — 22 miles distance — the rate is about 
25 cents per ton. Perhaps an average car rate is about 2 
cents per ton per mile. The beets are mostly grown around 
Lehi and Springfield, but American Fork, Provo, Pleasant 
Grove, Mapleton. Payson, Riverton, Lake View, etc., are 
other shipping points. The Sugar Company stands about 
one-third of the freight charges on the beets. The Lehi 
Company raised beets on only about 200 acres of land in 
1896 and 1897. 
The season of 1896-97 was the banner year of this fac- 
tory; 43,203 tons of beets were cut and 9,156,000 pounds of 
refined sugar were made. 
The conditions around Lehi are almost ideal for grow- 
ing beets and running a sugar factory. Fully nine-tenths of 
the farms are worked by the owners. The farms vary in size 
from five to forty acres, but there are said to be more farms 
under five acres than there are over forty acres. The farm- 
ers mostly live in the towns, which are but a few miles apart. 
The factory beets in 1897 were raised by about 700 farmers 
on 2,750 acres, thus averaging less than four acres to each 
grower. Mortgages on either farm or town property are 
very rare. There was no delinquent town tax at Lehi in 
1897, it is said that no tract of beet land has ever been 
sold at forced sale. There is more intense cultivation there, 
less expensive machinery, and more primitive methods in 
the field work. These latter increase the cost of production 
materially, but the families are generally large, and but little 
labor is hired on the farms. The women do not work’in the 
fields, and tlu^ girls seldom work there, unless at home. 
Much of the hand labor in raising beets is done by boys. 
Crop rotation is practiced in an erratic way, and live stock 
is kept on most of the farms, so that manure is freely used 
in fertilizing. As the alfalfa is needed for stock feed it is 
seldom plowed under. All the beets for this factory are 
raised by irrigation. 
