The Churchill county standard. (Fallon, Nev.) 1908-1920, 1916-08-23
INDIRECT BENEFITS FROM
RAISING OF SUGAR BEETS
Fields Planted TO Other Crops After
Beets Show Heavy Increases
In Production.
by Truman G. Palmer


The production of the food supply
of human beings ever has been and
ever will continue to be the most
important consideration Of man and
he who makes given area produce
a bushel and a peck where it form
erly produced but a bushel is pub
lie benefactor.
Two thousand years before the
birth of modern agricultural science
that science had reached a high lev
ell and the crop yields probably we're
greater than they are today.
One hundred and fifty years be-
fore Christ, Cato the Elder, the Rom
an statesman and patriot who fought
Hannibal and Hasdrubal, wrote a
book ON farm management, per-
usal of which would enlighten the
average American farmer today and
teach him how to increase the yield
of his fields
Cato proclaimed the fundamentals
of good agriculture in his De Re
Rustica when he said:
What is the first principle of go0d
agriculture? To pillow we'll What
is the second? To plow again; and
the third is, to manure
To the farmer who kept stock, he
said:
Plan to have a big compost heap
and take the best OF care of manure.
When it is hauled out, see that it ID
we'll rotted and spread.
And to the farmer who had no
stock he said:
You can make manure out of lit
ter, lupine straw, ehaff, bean stalks,
husks, and the leaves of the lick and
oak.
A hundred years after Catos
death, Augustus Caesar made fire.
quent mention of beets, which then
were one of the principal foods for
slaves, while the leaves long had
been used as an auxiliary fodder for
stock, and there are those who be-
lieye that, known by some other
name, beets formed an important
feature in Cato's crop system, just
as they did after their value had
been rediscovered 30 centuries later.
People forgot cato's teachings,
and when, 1000 years later, Ma
poleon Bonaparte stepped upon the
stage at the beginning of the nine
teeth century the worn-out soils of
Europe had reached their lowest
ebb in productiveness, and scientists
and economists were in despair be-
cause of the insufficient food produc-
ton to feed the ever-increasing pop
ulation.
The genealogy of modern Euro
pean scientific agriculture reaches
back to the beginning of the nine
teenth century only and shows that
the beet-sugar industry was it's
father and that Napoleon Bonaparte
was the father of the beet sugar in
dustry.
German scientists discovered the
presence of sugar in the beet and
perfected a method of extracting it,
but Napoleon Bonaparte's chemists
and economists, after 10 years of
scientific research, became convinced
that by growing sugar beets on a
} field one year in four the fertility
} of the soil thereby was so greatly in
creased that the combined yield OF
J other crops on the same soil during
: the next three years was greater
, than formerly 1t had been for four
. years, and It remained for Napole'
on himself 10 grasp the tremendous
significance of a discovery which
; could be made to serve the double
purpose of solving the nations food
/ supply problem and freeing it from
: dependence on Great Britain.
For centuries Europe had been
cursed with sagebrush, grayel-pii
farming methods, such as our low
crop yields demonstrate still are in
vogue to great extent in the United
States today, and while Napoleon
compelled the peasant farmers tc
grow beets whether they wished tc
or not, his scientists and their sue
oessors developed scientific agrioul
tural methods, taught the French
farmers how to cultivate beets Gnd
other crops properly, and as the
beet sugar industry spread to Other
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