BEET SUGAR

manufactured from the juice of the sugar beet_as cane sugar is made from the juice of the sugar cane. The po ibility of making sugar crystals from this particular variety of beet was discovered as long as 1747, by a German chemist, Margraf, but it was more than a century later before the discovery held anything but a theoretical interest. In the middle of last century an attempt was first made in Germany to employ the formula for commercial purposes. Similar attempts were made in this country, but it was not till 1870 that a factory was established, in Alvarado, Cal.» and it was 1879 before this venture was i firmly established as a paying busine . From that time the demand for the commodity grew much faster than the supply, as it was cheaper to manufacture than cane sugar. The difficulty was in obtaining a supply of raw material. American farmers before the 90's working with big areas of virgin soil, and unable to obtain a suitable supply of labor, preferred to raise grains and such other crops as were tilled wholesale by machinery. These conditions did not change till near the end of the century, when most of the best land was permanently settled and agriculture nece arily had to adjust itself to more intensive methods. In 1896 there were stili only seven beet sugar refineries in the United States, producing 42,000 tons of finished product a year. In 1917, however, this number had risen to over a hundred, producing 850,000 tons a year and employing, all told, 50000 men. The scarcity of sugar during the after the war period acted as a powerful stimulus on the growth of the industry obvious from the following figures: In 1920, when the sugar scarcity was at its height, slightly over 1,000,000 tons of beet sugar was produced in the United States, as compared to a little over 122,000 tons of cane sugar. Since then the production has dropped. In 1922 ne production of beet sugar was 674,000. ons,