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Show BEET SEED MAY BECOME PROFITABLE CROP FOR UTAH By CUn Meacham Six Utah counties are leading the way to, better sugar beet seed production " and the institution of tn entirely new Industry to the itate. Director W. W. Owens, of the Utah State Agricultural college col-lege extension service, reported recently. . . Experiments ana commercial plantings are now being conducted by Box Elder, Cache, Weber, Wasatch, Was-atch, Summit and Washington counties farmers under the direction direc-tion of sugar factories and their fieidr--en, he said. The results so far, have been encouraging. "Although this is not a crop for general farmers," Director Owens e in early summer, during June and July in southern Utah counties and July and August in northern sections of the state. After the beets come up they are not thinned nor blocked. They are irrigated and weeded and a good growth encouraged during fall growing months before the frosts set in. ' Harvesting is one with a mower. The tops are stacked in windrows and allowed to dry for about ten days after which they are threshed. Tl:e old system was to plant the beets in the spring, dig them in the fall ,and hold them in a pit over the winter. The second year the rocts were set out by hand which en ailed considerable work. Local climatic conditions control the time of planting and harvesting harvest-ing the crop. "If better places are found in which to grow the seed, the industry will naturally gravitate gravi-tate to those places, but we think we have the natural advantages necessary to hold the industry here in Utah," Director Owens concluded. stated, it does oner new crop possibilities ' Sugar factories contract the crop , and designate growers to produce ! it. "This offers two - advantages," he pointed out. "First is that the farmer knows he has a market for his crop and second, is that he lenows in advance he will get a fair price for it." Contract prices so far have ranged rang-ed as high as ten cents per pound for clean ' seed. (Present interest in sugar beet seea production was stimulated by a member of the USFA and New Mexico experiment station working at the Las Cruces experiment farm. He was attempting to establish the best time to plant commercial beets. Plants of seed were made on the first and fifteenth of each month ; beginning in September. The following spring he was surprised sur-prised to find that the seed he had planted ,the preceeding fall, all went to seed and grew very little root. This finding caused the experiment experi-ment station staff to change their experiment from commercial beet planting to beet seed investigation. They tried various ways of handling handl-ing the crop and also looked for other places in which to conduct experiments. They finally chose the vicinity about St. George and in 1932 the first commercial beet seed crop was harvested there. Mr. Owens pointed out that the present system of handling the crop is somewhat different from that employed during World War I. Today the crop is planted in the fall and allowed to pass the corman period through the winter in the ground. In the spring the plant produces an above-the-ground growth which goes to seed |