IIO 
The Colorado Experiment Station 
The following effects of the nitrates are so patent that they are 
beyond question. The sugar has been depressed by at least 2.0 per¬ 
cent. The total nitrogen has been doubled. The nitric nitrogen 
has been increased from ten to fourteen times. The injurious nitro¬ 
gen per 100 of sugar has been increased between three and four 
times and the injurious ash about twice. The same effects can be 
traced in our fertilizer experiments, though not so plainly. Further, 
these effects are so pronounced that no questions of water supply, 
cultivation, variety or strain of seed, the effect of leaf-spot, insect 
injury, climatic conditions, or the general conditions prevailing in 
our soils can in any way obscure them. How and to what extent 
these factors may have modified them is not a part of our present 
problem. These factors must be assumed to exist and to be oper¬ 
ative. 
We may now consider a few of our results obtained on samples 
grown on good ground without the addition of fertilizers of any 
kind and which may be assumed to represent beets as they are ac¬ 
tually grown for the factories. The beets designated as grown on 
bad land was such a crop and they were delivered to the factory. I 
wish to state emphatically that the following analyses do not repre¬ 
sent the quality of all of the crops delivered to the factories in 1910. 
for that would be absurd, as there are some excellent beets grown 
every year. If it were not so we would have more justification to 
attribute the low quality of our beets to climatic conditions or to. 
some other cause acting uniformly throughout the country, which is 
not true. These samples do, however, represent very many crops 
which are actually delivered to the factories. 
Total Nitric Injurious Injurious 
No. Locality Sugar Nitrogen Nitrogen N per Ash per 
percent Percent Percent 100 Sugar 100 Sug. 
1 . Pocky Ford 14.3 0.20605 0.01984 0.71591 3.1043 
2 . Fort Collins 13.2 0.18636 0.02138 0.63840 3.4164 
3. Pocky Ford 12.7 0.25215 0.04537 1.07246 3.7030 
The average percentage of sugar for these three samples is 13.7 
while the average for the Arkansas Valley for the same year, 1910, 
was approximately 14.2 so that they are only a little below the aver¬ 
age for the Valley. The low sugar, the high total nitrogen, the 
high nitric nitrogen, the large amounts of injurious nitrogen per 100 
sugar, and the relatively high injurious ash per 100 sugar can 
scarcely be attributed to any other cause than to an excessive supply 
of nitrates during the season, especially in view of the results just 
presented as having been definitely produced by nitrates either ap¬ 
plied to or formed in the soil. The Fort Collins sample was grown 
on the College Experimental Farm in the surface two inches of 
which we found in October nitric nitrogen equivalent to 160 pounds 
per acre. These samples were taken from fallow spots among the 
