INVESTIGATION OF DISEASES AFFECTING SUGAR
PRODUCTION

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1945

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE,
Washington, D. C.

Mr. GRANGER. We are glad to have with us this morning Mr. C. W. Doherty of the Great Western Sugar Co., at Denver, Colo., who I understand has a statement to make. We will be glad to hear from him at this time.

STATEMENT OF C. W. DOHERTY, DENVER, COLO., REPRESENTING THE GREAT WESTERN SUGAR CO.

Mr. DOHERTY. Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I represent the Great Western Sugar Co., a processor of sugar beets and operating in the Rocky Mountain region.

I want to say to this committee that as a processor we have found the work of this Department to be of exceeding importance and of immediate value to an unusual degree. I have prepared a short statement which I thought I could best read into the record, indicating in what respects we do consider it of such value. The sugar-beet crop is grown to some extent in a total of 21 States. This area of commercial sugar-beet production extends from California, Oregon, and Washington on the west, to Michigan on the east. The large producing areas are in California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, and Michigan. The acreage in the past 8-year period ended 1944 has ranged from a maximum of 1,048,000 acres in 1942 to a minimum of 616,000 acres in 1943.

The sugar-beet crop is of unusual value, particularly in the irrigated areas of western United States. Irrigated agriculture is expensive agriculture, and it is inherent that if the high fixed charges which are a part of irrigated agriculture are to be paid, some crop of high acre return must be grown. The standard crops will not do the job, and through a process of trial and error, the sugar-beet crop has been found to be the one crop grown in the temperate zone of the United States that makes possible the solvency of western irrigated agriculture. The records of one of the large reclamation projectsNorth Platte project-show that in normal times, 1933 to 1938, 21.6 percent of the total irrigated land was devoted to growing sugar beets, and yet the sugar-beet crop produced 54.16 percent of the gross farm revenue. The sugar beet as a plant is one of the most efficient convertents of solar energy that is known to botanists. An acre of sugar

beets will convert twice as much solar energy into usable materials as any other crop that can be grown on our irrigated lands in the temperate zone. An average acre of sugar beets will produce about 3,700 pounds of granulated sugar, and the byproducts-sugar-beet tops, pulp, and molasses-have a livestock feed value equal to the livestock feed that could be raised on an acre of irrigated land devoted exclusively to the production of alfalfa or grain. Since the sugar-beet crop is of such high agricultural efficiency, it would seem most important that it be continued in reasonably large magnitude as a part of American agriculture.

The greatest problem that the sugar-beet industry faces today has faced in the past, is the problem of field labor. Under past and present methods of growing the crop, it requires a large amount of hand labor. In the past 30 years great progress has been made in the reduction of labor needed to grow the standard farm crops. It is estimated that from 1900 to the present time, the hours of labor needed to grow an acre of wheat have been reduced from 8.8 hours to 3.3 hours, and similarly, the labor required to grow an acre of corn has been reduced from 15.1 hours to 6.9 hours. In other words, it now requires from 40 to 45 percent as much labor to grow these crops as it did 40 years ago. This has been brought about through the introduction of properly designed farm machinery combined with the use of the tractor. The handling of the sugar-beet crop, from a mechanical standpoint, has not kept pace with general farming. It is true the sugar-beet farmer prepares his land, cultivates it, and so forth, with the expenditure of less labor than he did 20 or 30 years ago; however, there still remains the burden of handwork-the blocking, thinning, hoeing, and the pulling and topping.

It might be of interest to review what type of labor has been used in the growing of the sugar-beet crop in the United States. The introduction of large-scale production of sugar beets in the United States began about the turn of the century, and this coincided with a large immigration of German-Russian people from the Volga River country of Russia. These emigrants had some experience in sugar-beet culture, and during the first 20 years of the preesnt century they did most of the hand work. They were, however, of a thrifty nature, and culturally raised themselves from the status of workers to that of tenants, and finally to landowners. A large number of these beet-working families of the early 1900's are now leading farmers in parts of the irrigated West. Through the sugar-beet crop they were able to build themselves into a secure and satisfactory financial condition. As the German-Russian people progressed from workers to tenants and landowners, it became apparent at the end of the First World War that they would not be available for sugar-beet work. It was then found that there was a large group of Spanish-American people in the Southwestern States to whom this work was quite attractive. These people came into the beet-growing areas for the summer period and some of them remained throughout the year, while the rest returned to the South for a more comfortable winter. The large part of the sugarbeet work during the years from 1920 to 1940 to the beginning of the Second World War was done by these Spanish-American people. During the past 5 years, however, all of the young men have been taken into the Army or have gone into industrial work, and each year there have been fewer and fewer Spanish-American people available

for sugar-beet work. The young Spanish-American who went into the Army or who went into industrial work will not come back in large number to the kind of work their fathers did. This means that we cannot expect in the future to have a large number of SpanishAmerican people who are interested in sugar-beet work. It seems self-evident then that if the sugar-beet industry is to continue, and to provide a very necessary crop for large areas of this country, some way must be found to reduce the labor needs in the growing of the crop, which means that ways and means must be found to grow the crop mechanically. That is the most important problem that the beetsugar industry faces at the present time, and unless it can be solved in the relatively near future there is grave question that the industry can continue.

Considerable progress has been made toward the mechanization of the growing of the crop. There has always been one large item-the hand work-that has retarded complete mechanization of sugar-beet growing. This hand work divides itself into two things: the thinning in the spring and the pulling and topping in the fall. One of the things that prevented mechanical thinning was the fact that the sugarbeet seed contained from two to five germs, and when it sprouted there were from two to five plants closely bunched together. Under these circumstances it was necessary to remove by hand all but one of the plants. Several years ago, in a cooperative project between the United States Beet Sugar Association and the University of California and the USDA, a method was evolved whereby the sugar-beet seed could be broken in such a way that each individual unit contained only one germ. The resulting product is called segmented beet seed, and if carefully planted single plants will result. The distance between these plants can be regulated by the amount of seed sown and the excess removed from the row by mechanical means. This is the ultimate expectancy in handling segmented seed. Most of the beet drills now in the hands of farmers do not plant the seed accurately and there is some bunching. Beet drills, however, are being developed which allow accurate planting, and it will be possible to get these drills in general use as full agricultural-machinery production is possible. However, at its present stage of development, the crop can be successfully thinned with a long-handled hoe at an expenditure of from 25 to 50 percent of the labor needed to thin standard seed. Even if finger thinning is used, the amount of labor is reduced from 25 to 40 percent. We do not yet know the full technic for handling segmented seed, either as to planting or thinning, and it is most important that every agency interested in the crop do as much research work as possible on this subject. This is indeed one of the projects in which the United States Department of Agriculture can be of the greatest value.

Harvesting machines are rapidly being developed. A number of implement companies are working on the problem, and definite progress is being made. Here, again, the full cooperation and effort of everyone interested in the development of the industry is needed. The USDA is doing excellent work in helping to evaluate and study these machines. They are limited, however, by the appropriations, and a much larger staff could be used to very good advantage. Today it requires on an average about 105 man-hours to raise and deliver an acre of sugar beets. Careful and conservative estimates indicate that

with complete mechanization this can be reduced to 50 man-hours per

acre.

There are a number of diseases which affect the sugar-beet crop, and the United States Department of Agriculture has done fine work in their prevention and control. The breeding of curly-top resistant seed and leaf-spot-resistant seed has been a great development. Work on nematode control, black-root control, and some of the other diseases is most important, and the work along these lines at the present time. should be continued.

There are two phases of the mechanization program. The first one is the development of machinery needed to do the job, and the second one is the development of an agronomic program which makes possible the use of this machinery. The USDA can help materially in both of these programs. A considerably large sum of money should be appropriated for the development of the agricultural machinery, and the workers in agronomic lines should, at least for the immediate present, bend their efforts toward solving some of the agronomic problems having to do with mechanization. In this connection, there are such problems as spacing in the rows, proper planting methods, and so forth. Segmented seed is only a stopgap in the mechanization program. It is necessary to have a seed unit containing as nearly as possibly only one germ. That seed unit is now obtained by segmenting seed at a terrific loss of seed material. If it could be attained by proper breeding methods, or in other words, if a beet seed could be bred containing for the most part only one seed germ, that would be the desirable result. It is proper that special emphasis should be given to this question of breeding a single germ seed.

That is all I have to offer, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. GRANGER. Are there any questions by the committee?

Mr. HILL. How many acres of sugar beets are raised annually in the State of Colorado? Can you give us the average figures?

Mr. DOHERTY. The average acreage for the State of Colorado? Well, I would say that an average of normal production in the territories of Great Western would be 150,000-well, there would probably be a total of 222,000 or 225,000 acres, the normal crop of the State. Mr. HILL. What State ranks next to Colorado in beet acreage? Mr. DOHERTY. Generally California.

Mr. WICKERSHAM. In my district in Oklahoma there is a new irrigation district comprising about 70,000 acres which is going under water now, or will next year. They have about 27 inches of rainfall. It is deep, sandy loam, ranging into high land. Do you think sugar beets would grow there?

Mr. DOHERTY. I think it is a very distinct possibility. It is the general broad experience that the further south you go in the temperate zone the more inclination the crop has to produce beets of a little lower sugar test than they have as you go further north. For instance, when you get into Montana and northern Minnesota, the normal sugar percentage of that crop is considerably higher than it is, we will say, in Colorado and that belt. The reason for that is not entirely clear, although we think we know in general. We think that probably the hours of sunshine have something to do with it. As we get a little further south into Oklahoma I presume there would be that tendency toward a lower sugar content. I know of no other reason why the crop would not grow.