COSTS OF PRODUCING SUGAR BEETS
Of the 78 sugar-beet factories operating in the United States in
1926, 17 were situated in Colorado, 15 in Michigan, 10 in Utah, 6 in
Nebraska, 5 each in Ohio and California, 3 in Idaho, and 17 scattered
over the States of Wisconsin, Montana, Wyoming, Iowa, Illinois,
[ndiana, Kansas, Minnesota, and Washington. The most recent
detailed statistics of beet-sugar manufacture are those of the Census
for 1925. In that year the 89 factories reported by the Census in
October, the month of heaviest production, employed 22,522 wage
sarners and paid out over $12,000,000 in wages during the year.
The total cost of the raw materials for the industry was $87,038,000,
and the total value of the products, $132,339,000, of which sugar
constituted 94 per cent; and pulp, molasses, and other minor prod-
ucts the rest. The production of beet sugar in the United States
in 1925-26 in terms of raw sugar, amounted to 962,000 short tons,
as compared with an estimated world production of beet sugar of
9,028,300 tons. In the same year the production of cane sugar in
continental United States was 197,528 tons; in Hawaii, 723,000 tons;
and in Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, 604,000 tons; making a
total cane and beet sugar production in the United States and its
possessions of 2,486,528 tons. The estimated world production of
cane sugar was 18,628,000 tons, and the total world production of
both beet sugar and cane sugar was 27,656,000 tons. Thus the beet
sugar in the United States constituted 39 per cent of the total pro-
duction of sugar in the United States and its possessions, or 314 per
cent of the total world production.!
Among important producing countries, the United States in 1926
was surpassed in tons of sugar beets grown only by Germany, and
in acres planted to beets, only by Germany and the Soviet Republic.
Central and Western Europe are the world’s most important sugar-
beet region. (See Table 2.) The yields in the countries in this re-
zion are generally heavier than in the United States because of their
more intense cultivation. For example, in 1924, with an average
yield of 11.6 tons per acre, Germany produced 11,317,000 tons of
beets on 975,000 acres, while, with an average yield of 9.2 tons per
acre, the United States produced 7,489,000 tons on 815.000 acres.
"Yearbook of U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1925, n “rc
