The advocate., 1894-01-31

VS0, H4 OI WHICH experiments are be
ing tried in southern California.
The first sorghum cane to this coun.
try about forty years ago. 1t received
its first encouragement a few years
afterwards when the civil war began
and Louisiana sugar was blockaded
from the north and the west. In Cali
fornia the oriental crusher was used,
because of its simplicity of manufGS'
ture, cheap material and easy method
Of working 1.-THE motive power being
a horse and two girls. A trough"
is followed from a tree stump, with.
in is the grinding pestle, worked by a
mule blindfolded, treading as in an
old-fashioned treadmill, propelling the
arm of the crooked wooden bar. A
girl follows in the wake of the mule,
pushing him along, with a Gee,
Whoa, git up thar, Jim!'' varying the
monotony by humping him with a
club Another woman feeds it the
cane, each one separately, the canes
passing through to the opposite side
when the life or substance has been
squeezed out of them. The process is
very slow, but it was then an infant
industry. The farmer, it is supposed.
was near by lying down in the shade,
overseeing his daughters doing the
work.
Now this work is done by machinery,
and the old primitive mills are rele-
gated to the woodshed as curiosities.
AS is well known, the modern machine
crushers are large cast iron rollers,
two or three in set, with a pressure
of about fifty pounds to the square
inch. Instead of the cane being put
in by hand, one at time, they are fed
In on an endless belt, and after the
life, or sugar, is crushed out, the splin-
ters of the cane come out on the other
side, and are fed to the furnace to
make steam for the crushing ma
chinery. The farmer of a generation
ago looks with amazement upon this
improvement, and his little wooden
cider-press arrangement does look
rather comical in contrast. The de-
partment or agriculture has dCue lnore
to develop the sorghum industry than
have the farmer sugar makers. They
were content to produce enough for
home consumption, with small sur
plus to lend to their neighbors How
ever, the greater portion of their sugar
crop was sirup. They would exhaust
the molasses before it reached the sugar
stage. These small farmers do not
care for improved machinery. BY the
old method they feed the refuse of the
cane to the hogs instead of to the fur
mace. The pigs get fat on the sacchar-
Inc substance that the old crude
wooden roller does not crush out, so
the old-fashioned farmer has found an
economy in nature, and nothing is lost
save time and muscular labor, both of
which seem TO be abundant.
A superior article of sugar is made
by the bees, but in very small quanti-
ties II Is estimated that the little
busy bee must tap from one million to
two millions of flowers before he ex.
tracts more than one pound of sugar.
BY the aid Of chemical science, some
OF our advanced ranchers are making
superior grade ofsugar from the water
melon.
But the beet sugar industry is about
te suDersede all others of that nature.
The beet from which sugar is made is
not Of the type that the old fashioned
New England dinner is made, but is a
big beet, weighing ordinarily two
pounds, from an acre of which about
twenty tons of sugar is made. The
beet contains much less sugar, rela-
lively, than does the cane, and as the
molasses Of the beet is rather indi-