American Falls press. [volume] (American Falls, Idaho) 1907-1937, 1910-12-10

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~ saccharine sea has ma
H]fW saccharine sea has an
va other thing to perform.
1t is always SO in agriculture,
and scarcely less so in other pur-
suits. Each day or season brings
it's new adjustment with relation to
other things and elements, Eternal
viligance" is the price.
Staid old industries no sooner be-
come settled upon fixed principles
than some new element enters into
it and changes the equation. A
crop that is well understood may be
planted upon soil that has been so
depleted that with this season ma
ture fails to find proper comblna-
ton TO make proper results. and a
short crop confronts the farmer or
the community. Soil may be main
tanned by fertilization and rotation,
and unusual frost or storm may
change the expected results Cut
worms, ohinch bugs, rust; these
may attack the staple grain crops,
but the agrarian does not quit. Hail
may visit a locality given up to pro
duction and to canning, ard COM
pell a years recess, and while the
soil and machinery sleep. man or
ries and frets, for he has but a shor
time upon the earth.
The man in business becomes
weary of the ceaseless strife and
hustle necessary to keep in the pro-
cession and decides to put his money
into land because it will not run
away or be ruined by competition.
In order that he may have some
thing growing while he sleeps, he
invests in timber lands, and a sea-
son like that of 1910 leaves him
without even the stumps.
A dozen states in the southland
became a world foctor because of
cotton. The civil war presented to
them an equation which they rose
to solve. and the result confronted
them with tie apparently impossi-
BILE end of a bad job. They rose
again, slowly, surely, and became
eminently successful and in time to
take a position as a world power be-
fore King Cotton become enthroned
on another continent.
Now comes an insect called bowl
weevil," and from the Rio Grande
they travel northeastward in such
numbers that the figures of mathe-
.maticians can not be grouped in suf-
S"ficient sections to indicate the meas
ure of their plentitade. Expanding
just forty miles a year in new terri
tory, they have served notice on the
southern planter of the exact year
when they will have covered the last
acre of the cotton belt.
No such menace ever threatened
the sugar beet crop. But no such
menace ever thretened the cotton
crop befor Grasshoppers nave
swept the plains of Kansas. hot
winds have crumpled the foliage of
NJ braska, and the white fly has
visited the beet fields of Utah and
Idaho, but this lasts only one sea-
son and may never come again.
Some fields farther advanced than
others may be immune from its ray
ages and the whole community does
notsuffer as do individuals.
The lot, then. of the sugar beet
raiser is on a par with that of other
producers of staple crops unless the
finnl analysis on heal questions is
against him. In this we find him
lodging two widely offering con-
ditions with problems of the un-
measured future to be worked upon
in determining his post. ~
In a sparsely settled country
there is not enough labor that can
be modified in the beet fields at
thinning time, and in new states
where resources are rare, people
capable of thinning beets decline to
mobilize. The work is hard and
tedious, and they think they can do
better. Importing Orientals to do
this work is to undo the social
fabric and to JAPANESE" America to
an extent that has set the people OF
the west against the Oriental.
In a densely populated country
the people might raise sugar beets
so far as the labor supply is con-
cerned, but the dense population has
to eat SO many things besides sugar
that car not be brought from afar.
the low price for a ton of beets for
which payment will be made in No
vember. looks low by comparison
with the prices paid for radishes
and lettuce that can be grown paid
for and forgotten by beet-thinning