Sugar Beets and Sugar Cane

R39

shape. It has been carefully developed for nearly a century by selecting
 year after year the seeds of the sweetest beets. Eighty years
ago it took eighteen pounds of beets to yield one pound of sugar,
while now only six to eight pounds are needed.
Where the sugar plants grow in the United States. The United
States extends so far from north to south that all four sugar plants
are grown within its limits — maple, beet, sorghum, and cane. Figure
 52 shows where the three most important grow. Notice that
the sugar beet is grown in the cool northern states, the cool plateau
states of the West, and the cool Pacific coast states, while sugar cane
is confined to the warmer southern states. Sorghum does well in the
cooler parts of the South. Sugar maple trees grow in our northernmost
 states from Indiana eastward, and in southern Canada.
Sugar beets. Sugar beets could be grown much more extensively
in the United States than they now are, but they are crowded out by
more profitable crops, such as cereals. They are not well adapted
to American methods of agriculture, because they require much
hand labor. No machines have as yet been invented for weeding
the young plants and thinning them out.
Because the better soil is used for more profitable crops, beets are
often given on™ ‘= can il where little else will grow. This

£7

tL
x

UN-TED ST*"
SUGAR CR:
ACREAGE. 191%

EACH DOT REPRESENTS 1000 =.

Fic. 52. Only 5 per cent of the sugar used commercially in the United States is produced in the
cane region of the southern states (chiefly Louisiana), while 18 per cent comes from sugar beets.
The rest is imported. This country takes almost the entire Cuban and Porto Rican crop.