A FEW WORDS ON USES OF BEET.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume XIII, Issue 548, 3 February 1868, Page 5 (Supplement)

A FEW WORDS ON USES OF BEET.

.\in eminent imjgliahagnculiuiist writes thus from the other side of the Channel t i - i I was under the impression that we; had nothing to learn from foreign farm | ing and sugar making except what I d avoid ; but a day or two with M. Decronibecque, M. Cail, and M. Bailly, at Trappes, has convinced me to the contrary. M. Cail has on one farm 1500 acres of splendid beet, 1500 acres of wheat, and 1500 acres of grasses. I have been much struck at the state ments made as to the feeding value of the pulp from Silesian beet after the sugar has been extracted. M. Decrombecque, M. Cail, and others, assured me that a ton of pulp is equal to the. same weight of raw mangold. The pulp keeps good for months, if stored in tanks sunk in the ground and properly secured. Now, as they can grow sugar beet in Holland, Denmark, Rus- j sia, as well as in Germany, Belgium, j and the cold north of France, why cannot we?” Well, it is not very easy! { to answer this question; and the en-| jeouraging history ami prospects of the j manufacture are enough to make us j reconsider our attitude with respect to jit. A hundred and twenty years ago, jMarggraaf, at Berlin, made the discoj very that pure sugar could be extracted [from; the juice of beetroot. In 1799, jArlhur xoung announced that “M. Achard, professor of chemistry at Ber--1 lin, has discovered a method of making sugar from beetroot. He makes from two-thirds of an English acre 22 cwt? of raw sugar, equal in qualify to the West Indian. He presented to the King of Prussia a loaf of it, who offered M. Achard 100,090 dollars for the invention. The discovery makes great noise in Germany, and is considered as an object of vast importance. The German name is Kundel Kube.” The manufacture received a great impetus in France in 1812. Experiments wore made with different roots ; and at last, after various crossings in the seed, a kind of beet was produced, which has been since known as the “ French yellow beetroot, this, with the Silesian and Prussian beet, now forming the raw material of a very extensive trade. In the year 1865-6, France raised and consumed 270,000 tons of beet sugar ; the German Zollverein, 180,000 tons; and Russia 50,000 tons. Throughout Europe more than 1400 manufactories are at work, and between them made 630.000 tons of sugar in that year. The area of land under the crop was 297.000 acres, yielding on an average 16 tons of beet root per acre, while the sugar extracted was at the rate of 7 per cent, costing 2d per pound. Moreover, although the business was somewhat precarious last year, having been favorable only for France, while in Germany the weather brought an inferior produce, and in Russia caused a failure of the crop, it is a fact that the breadth of land sown has steadily increased year by year. It is now sixteen or seventeen years since the policy of introducing the manufacture into j this country received full inquiry and j discussion. Sugar-Beet establishments were tried in Essex and in Ireland, and the conclusion arrived at —as summarised by the Agricultural Gazette in 1851—was, that “ the cultivation of beetroot for sugar-making is not quite so hopeless as that of tobacco; and that is nearly all that can be said in its favor. We should prefer a crop of 30 tons, of mangold wurtzel, consumed by cattle on the land, to a sugar crop of 12 tons, yielding 10$ per acre delivered at the works, and so making no return of manure to the soil.” However, continued success on the Continent appears to crown the manu*

racture when it is conducted by the grower of the roots, through the value of the residual pulp for cattle feeding and manuring. The great point in an appeal for renewed attention to the subject is, that the conditions having changed since 1851, estimates then made are no longer applicable to the present time. At that date a sugar factory was a costly erection: steamengines, mills, boilers, coolers, centrifugal machines were required to convert the saccharine root into first a pulp, then a syrup, then a brown, sticky matter, gradually dark, then yellow, jaiid at lust whits sugar. 13ut we are

told that now, by the simplest process and like magic, the beet is transformed, without crushing or boiling, into a pure white crystallised sugar,leaving neither molasses nor waste. In Germany, loaf

sugar, Guliiuiy itcu liOui UOplcaSaUl taste or smell, is produced directly from the beet; and within the last two years the sugar lias possessed such purity and whitejiess that it bus been sold directly for .consumption without reffinner. The fact that. t.hft imuroved mode of manufacture is easy and inexpensive, places the question of sugar beet growing in a new light; and its merits will be canvassed by those farmers who are wont to look ahead of their brethren.—From an article iu the Daily Telegraph.