Deterioration Sugar Beets Due to Nitrates 25 
separated. The Arkansas Valley is about 200 miles south of the 
Cache la Poudre Valley,, and the Grand Valley must be 350 miles in 
an an line south and west and 1,000 feet lower than the farming 1 
sections of the Poudre Valley. I do not know that there is no cer- 
cospora in the Grand Valley, but 1 know that there has been no dam¬ 
age done in the valleys, either of the Grand, the Gunnison or the 
Uncompahgre, and while this fungus is present in the Poudre Val¬ 
ley sections it has done no damage. In the Arkansas Valley, how¬ 
ever,. it has been very bad, destroying the foliage of many fields. 
Portions of the Arkansas Valley have as great an altitude as the 
Grand V alley and the latter is as warm as the former. Whatever 
the reason may be, this fungus has, in past years, been very bad in 
the Arkansas V alley. I will digress further to state that the sugar 
content of the beets from badly infested fields is not always low nor 
the yield necessarily below the average. It is scarcely to be doubted 
but that the destruction of a very large part of the foliage of the 
beets in August has some effect upon both the yield and the percent¬ 
age of sugar. At my request Mr. Winterhalter kindly collected the 
record of 127 fields affected in various degrees by the leaf-spot. The 
variations appear to me to be due more to other causes than to the 
leaf-spot as we find the leaf-spot beets from sections in which the 
beets are generally rich also rich and in sections which produce poor 
beets we find them poor. I will give only a part of this data as my 
object is simply to show to what extent we may be justified in enter-, 
taining serious doubts in regard to the conclusions which we almost 
unconsciously accept as evident or fully proven, when we see a 
field of beets quite denuded of its foliage, i. e., that the beets are 
poor. 
The climatic conditions in 1910 were as favorable as we can 
ever expect to have them. The aggregate acreage repreesnted by 
these 120 fields is 2,425.5 acres. The crop grown on the land the 
previous year was in most of the cases beets but in some cases it 
v/as not; wheat, oats, alfalfa, melons, cantaloupes and sorghum had 
been grown 011 some of the land. One piece had been fallow and 
one was new sod land. These districts represent the valley for a 
distance of about 120 miles. The individual fields represened a range 
in area from two to one hundred and nine acres. The percentage 
of sugar in the beets are averages for the whole field. The violence 
of the attack can not well be described more accurately than by the 
general terms used. I recall a field that I visited in which I do not 
think that any of the plants had escaped having at least 90 percent 
of their foliage destroyed. I do not know what the average sugar 
content of the beets from this field was as they were taken to the 
factory but the field samples averaged something above 16.0 per¬ 
cent. 1 he attack in this case was very bad. If these samples show 
