COSTS OF PRODUCING SUGAR BEETS 
REPRESENTATIVENESS OF THE INVESTIGATION 
The commission desired to obtain data which would show the costs 
of producing sugar beets in the various regions and for the country 
as a whole. As it was of course impracticable to obtain costs from 
all growers, representative areas in the chief producing regions were 
selected. The records obtained for the 22 selected areas cover 2,242 
farms in the nine States—Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, 
[daho, Wyoming, Montana, and California. 
These nine States produced 94 per cent of the total beet tonnage 
and included 92 per cent of the acreage of sugar beets harvested in 
the United States in 1922. The area investigated produced 12.1 per 
cent of the total tonnage and was 10.4 per cent of the total acreage 
planted in sugar beets in the United States that year. The per- 
centage of the production investigated in tbe individual States 
ranged from 6.5 in Idaho to 27.3 in Wyoming. For the individual 
areas so visited the commission’s figures cover from one-fifth to one- 
half of the beets produced. The beets for which cost data were 
obtained were manufactured into sugar in 58 of the 81 beet-sugar 
factories operating in the United States in 1922, 
In Idaho data were obtained for 106 farms, or 3.8 per cent of 
the total number in the State that reported the production of sugar 
beets in the 1919 census. These farms produced 6.5 per cent of 
the total beet tonnage and had 5 per cent of the total acreage of 
sugar beets harvested in the State in 1922. 
As shown in Table 1, page 16, the areas investigated were located 
in regions of dense production, where sugar beets are an important 
farm crop. A sufficiently large number of localities and farms were 
visited by the agents of the commission to make the data obtained 
representative of the industry as a whole. 
Table 2, page 18, indicates that the farms investigated grew more 
acres of sugar beets per farm than did the average farm for the 
respective States in which the investigations were made, and conse- 
quently were perhaps operated more efficiently. (See Table 3, p. 
18.) The larger acreage of sugar beets on the farms investigated 
may be partly accounted for by the fact that cost data were not 
obtained for farms having less than 3 acres of beets per farm, although 
beets were grown on some smaller farms in each area, especially near 
the cities. 
In like manner Table 4, page 19, showing considerably higher aver- 
age yields per acre of sugar beets on the farms investigated than on 
all farms in any State, may mean that the farms for which cost data 
were obtained are better or are operated by better farmers. 
Table 5, page 20, shows that for the three years 1921 to 1923 the 
average sugar content of the beets grown in the representative areas 
of the States investigated was higher by one-half a pound per ton of 
beets harvested than the average sugar content for all beets grown in 
the nine States visited, and higher by 1.4 pounds per ton than the 
average for all beets grown in the 17 sugar-beet States. 
Table 6, page 21, shows that the three-year average of sugar 
extracted from a ton of beets for the country as a whole was 258 
pounds, while for the nine States covered by the investigation it