Lancaster daily intelligencer. [volume] (Lancaster, Pa.) 1864-1928, 1880-05-15
1ancaster fr1telligellrer.
SUGAR vs. CORN.

SUGAR vs.. CORN.
Letter From Victor e. PiolIet.
Worthy Grange Master Piollet writes
the following to the editor of the Farmers
Friend:
Your recent communication invites a
word from me as to the cost of sugar
mill and evaporating pans, with view to
trial of sugar making, l suppose. The
entire cost is less than one hundred dol
lars for a mill and fixtures capable OF
working up say thirty acres of amber cane
within the season.
Wysauking grange will enter upon a
trial this season different members plant
ing an acre of the cornfeld with the Min
nesota amber cane, purchased by the COM
missioner of the agricultural department
to such desire to make a trial Of sugar
making.
We poor farmers are all working for dear
life to produce corn which we will have to
sell in our export markets for less than GO
cents bushel, after paying one-fourth of
this sum for transportation. Every bush
ell of corn that farmers will produce this
season will take from the soil in potash,
nitrogen and phosphorus twenty per cent
of this export market price. There is no
home market for our corn. The only value
there is attainable is the foreign demand.
With this well l-known fact we stick to the
old rut and make corn year after year at
the sacrifice of capital and labor.
While twenty per cent. of the market
value of our corn will he required to make
ourfields as good after the crop has been
taken from them as before planting, we
persist in producing corn to the exclusion
nf Of ,iru fhaf Hrn1lI
very much better. Thiscountry pays over
one hundred million dollars annually to
foreign countries for sugar. While the
production of corn takes from the soil in
nitrogen, phosphorus and potash twenty
per cent. of its market value there is no
perceptible trace of either nitrogen, phos-
phOruS or potash in sugar.
This fact ought to influence our farmers.
The entire value of the corn we market
does not amount to as much as we pay out
for sugar, and we can make sugar enough
for home consumption at q far less cost
than any production of our farms that we
must dispose of to get money to pay for
the sugar We purchase.
The corn fields of Pennsylvania that will
produce forty bushels per acre will produce
enough of the Minnesota amber cane to
make one thousand five hundred pounds of
sugar that refiners would purchase as read
lily as they do tue foreign sugar.
Amber cane can be produced at the same
cost that our corn can be raised. 1t will
mature in from ninety to one hundred days,
and will cost in our labor about three cents
per pound to make.
This is not speculation. Our worthy
commissioner of agriculture, Gen LIE Due,
has tested the whole process of sugar max
ing by actual practical methods.
France, at no very distant perion of time,
was depended upon foreign countries for
her supply Of sugar, now not only supplies
her own country with the annual consump-
tion of sugar, but makes fourth of all
the sugar production in this world.
France makes sugar from beets. Did
she have our soil and climate in which to
grow all the varieties of cane that is natural
to our country, that country would make
sugar rs we can. Your friend,
V. L. PIOLLET.
Wysox, May 10, 1880.