Deterioration Sugar Beets Due to Nitrates 49 
Samples XI and XII were grown on a light, loamy, virgin soil 
with a scanty supply of either rain or irrigating water. The sam¬ 
ples were gathered rather early in the season and the beets were still 
growing. The quality of these beets was, as the analyses shoy, 
really good; 14.2 percent sugar in sample XI and 13.8 percent as 
the average sugar content of the beets as harvested. The injurious 
ash per 100 parts of sugar was 3.53, which is perhaps a rather large 
amount, but I have been unable to find any statement relative to the 
permissible amount of injurious ash in beets or diffusion juices. 
The injurious nitrogenous substances, 3.74 parts per 100 of sugar, 
are quite low, in fact they are lower than in either the Michigan or 
Fort Collins beets which we tentatively adopted as standards of 
comparison, and as low as Andrlik’s No. VI, which he judges as a 
good beet. An examination of the ash analysis shows the presence 
of a remarkably high percentage of chlorin; 14.641 percent in the 
pure ash. One might, perhaps, be justified in expecting to find a 
corresponding amount of sodic oxid but this constituent is quite 
low for our beets. In the ash of the Michigan beet both of these 
constituents are much lower but the soda in the ash of the Fort Col¬ 
lins beet is much higher. The soil on which these beets grew, like 
all of our semi-arid soils, is alkaline, but is not charged with alkali 
salts as we understand the term and as has been sufficiently ex¬ 
plained in the preceding pages. We further observe that the ash, 
whether we consider the crude or the pure ash, is, compard with the 
figures given for foreign beets since 1890, higher by at least fifty 
percent than the figures given by Ruempler for beets grown without 
the application of kainite, and materially higher than the figures 
for those to which this salt was applied. They are also quite as 
much higher than the figures given by F. Strohmer and O. Fallada 
for Austrian beets grown with application of phosphoric acid, salt 
and sodic nitrate or amnionic sulfate and it is also materially higher 
than the Michigan and some of our Colorado beets. That our con¬ 
ditions are wholly different from Austrian conditions, for instance, 
is indicated by the fact that though the Austnan beets were grown 
on land to which an application of 9.2 pounds of salt per acre had 
been applied the chlorin in the pure ash of eleven samples, showed 
a maximum of 3.27 percent of chlorin, whereas the pure ash of these 
beets grown on virgin ground without the application of any fer¬ 
tilizer, shows the presence of 14.64 percent; on the other hand, the 
ashes of the Austrian beets show from 9.24 to 22.39 percent of sodic 
oxid, while the pure ash of these beets shows the presence of 6.15 
percent which is calculated as metallic sodium in the statement of 
the analysis. The first thought is that sodic nitrate had been ap¬ 
plied to the Austrian beets. This is true in the case of three out of 
eleven, and not true of the other eight; so the presence of such 
