Beet

a well known vegetable belonging to the pigweed family. The original beet still grows wild in southern Europe and in parts of Asia. From it have been developed the garden beet, the chard, the mangel, and the sugar beet. The original beet had a slender root. The top was used for greens. The root has developed under cultivation. The chards were cultivated by the Greeks over 2,000 years ago. The development of table beets has gone on for many centuries. The rich, red, smooth, tender, shapely beet of today is the result of planting the seed of the beet in rich garden soil century after century.

The coarser, unimproved varieties of beets are known as mangels. Seeds were brought from England by the earliest colonists. Mangels are still raised as a standard field crop for feeding cattle. Sheep do well on sliced mangels. A mangel clapped on a long nail in the wall of the chicken house affords an excellent winter diversion for laying hens.

All varieties of beets are biennial. Like turnips the root of one year produces seed the second year and then dies. In all cold countries it is necessary to pull the seed beets and store them in a dry, cool, frost-proof cellar or root house. Owing to the higher cost of American labor, we import a large proportion of our beet seed from Europe.

The discovery of sugar in the beet dates from 1747. Credit is due to a German chemist. No important commercial results followed until experiments were renewed under the direction of Napoleon, who ordered ten factories to be built in France. With the exception of Turkey, all European countries now produce beet sugar. More beet sugar is now produced than is made from cane. The world's production for 1906 aggregated about 7,000,000 tons, as compared with 5,000,000 tons of cane sugar. A number of attempts to set up beet sugar factories in the United States at Philadelphia, Northampton, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, were unsuccessful. In 1869 the beet sugar industry was established at Alvarado, California. A wide strip of territory, extending clear across the United States, has been found well suited to the production of sugar beets, and a large amount of American capital is now invested in the production of beet sugar.

The difficulty of getting out the sugar without the red coloring matter led to the breeding of a beet from the lightest colored mangels. The present sugar beet is as white as a turnip. By planting the seeds of the sweetest beets, the yield of sugar has been increased from 100 pounds of sugar to the ton of beets in Napoleon's factories to an average of perhaps 250 pounds to the ton in 1908.

Beet seed-ten to fifteen pounds to the acre-is sown in drills about the time of corn planting. The seed should be covered about three-fourths of an inch. The drills should be about three feet apart, and the young plants should be thinned in the row to stand two to three feet apart, giving 5,000 to 7,000 beets to the acre. Rich clay loam soil seems best. The irrigated lands of the west yield famous crops.

Beets are dug by a double shoe plow or lifter. The beets pass between the shoes and are elevated. They are then topped close by hand and thrown into heaps to wait convenience in hauling. Loading is done with forks. The railway sidings in beet countries are furnished with elevated platforms from which the farmer dumps his load of beets into a flat car. Freezing does no harm. In Minnesota beets go to market as hard as rocks.

Arrived at the factory the roots are washed clean and sliced, this all by machinery. The sugary juice is extracted by soaking the pulp in water that is changed frequently. It is treated with limewater and sulphur. It is filtered and evaporated, purified and bleached. The sugar is finally sacked and sent to market. The discarded pulp is sold for stock food.

There were in 1905 about 1,300 beet sugar factories in the civilized world. Of these there were 64 in the United States. They were distributed in 16 states from New York to California. Michigan had 17; California had 15. In 1908 the factories of the United States turned out about 1,000,000,000 pounds as against 8000,000,000 pounds of American cane sugar. In that year American consumed over 8,000,000,000 pounds of sugar. The beet sugar industry is not likely to be overdone. Three hundred factories running the year around would not supply more sugar than we now import.

See Sugar; Vegetables