Excerpt from The Technology of Sugar

Why, therefore, continue to endow and repeat experiments to demonstrate acknowledged facts? Again, as pointed out by Voelcker, British farmers will possibly demur to grow, as at Lavenham, small crops, rich in sugar, if they cannot get more than twenty shillings per ton delivered, a seemingly good price, and a good profit, but cart age may average five shillings per ton, leaving only fifteen shillings per ton clear. If it suit continental farmers to sell beets at fifteen shillings a ton it does not do so here, where it pays better to convert beets into beef. Again, where sufficient cattle food cannot be raised for fattening purposes and big sums are spent in buying Oil-cake, etc., a farmer cannot be expected to sell beets at twenty shillings per ton delivered. If he be a shareholder in the sugar factory (p. 11) he may foolishly imagine that he recoups himself for his heavy loss on beets by his sugar-factory dividends. When the truth is realised by the farmer there should be a better outlook in Britain both for sugar-beet growing and beet-sugar manufacture, provided always they be conducted on rational principles and with unstinted capital. The risk of over-capitalisation in a beet factory is' far less than in those numerous undertakings which are burdened from the outset with such an amount of capital that even the greatest en thusiasts can have no hope of utilising but a mere fraction thereof.

The farmer must not expect too much from selling his beets and must ignore the promise Of getting the residuals back as free meals for his cattle, or as free manure for his land. His sale of beets should be outright and no other consideration should inter vene, more especially anything Of the nature of barter. In France, at any rate, the farmer buys his beet pulp from the sugar factory. Listen to what M. Leon Lindet, Professor Of the National Agronomial Institute, says It is not only in selling beets to the sugar manufacturers that the farmers come in contact with them, they buy their pulp and even molasses, the use of which extends more and more. The use of beet-sugar molasses by the farmer would return the enormous amount of potash which it removes from the soil, which when molasses is distilled finds its way into the soft soap pan instead of the soil. From what has been said it will be seen that the statements that the farmer practically gets back the beet almost as it left the farm, and for nothing, and that the soil is not exhausted, every constituent being returned, are statements neither of which will bear investigation. Even the statements as to Steffen' s slices of spent 'pu1p containing 3 per cent. Of sugar no longer holds good; all the sugar is now extracted in the Steffen process. In fact, the beet -sugar propagandists have hardly made a statement or a deduction which will bear the slightest investigation, which Is a great pity as all who are competent to know and have the interests of the industry at heart will at once concede.

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