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Show Dixie Sugar Beet Seed Growers Visit California, Arizona Beet Seed Farms By ANSON B. CALL County Agent The beet seed growers from Washington county made a trip to the beet seed growing sections sec-tions of California and Arizona to study the methods used there in raising and harvesting sugar beet seed. The group left St. George at four o'clock Wednesday Wednes-day morning, June 10 and got back Sunday night, June 13. '. Erwin Farrar, president of the Farrap-Loomis Seed company com-pany of Hemet, California, showed show-ed us around the beet fields and places of interest. In Hemet this year there are about six-hundred acres of beet seed. It looks very fine. They are expecting to get a larger yield this year than last. All of the country in Hemet which has sugar beets is irrigated irrigat-ed from pumps, these pumps are in every locality, and they try to get the water over the beets every week. They figure that they use three and one-half second feet of water for this system per year. The patches of beets are somewhat some-what larger in Hemet than they are in Utah, varying from twenty to eighty acres in a field. The rotation is mostly with small grains and sugar beets. As yet they not planted beets a second time on their land but they plan on a six-year rotation as they think it will take that long to get the maximum use from the land. In Hemet Valley there are six or seven thousand acres which are adapted to sugar beets. In some localities they figure it is too warm to raise, beets as they do not have, sufficient cold weather weath-er to cause the: beets to bolt. This is mostly In the locality where, they have their citrus 'grQvea, They are trying to stay away from that section and go into colder regions. The' beets are harvested with power mowers and placed in small piles rather than in shocks as we do in Utah. They think they dry out more uniformly and less seed is wasted by doing this way. They put about enough for a fork full in one pile and arrange the piles so that none will touch another pile. Tl- - '-iHpfl on wagons w'" ta and 'haul. . the thr,"Sher from the -9M. The threshes machines which they use belong to toT company which buys the s TheT resh ng machines are C'Sd for ttrs s small grain, flax, and sugar hem, , seed and the mach'.ie is rebuilt each time with special equpment I in the body to facilitate the threshing of the particular Peed which they are going fco thresh. They figure that it costs them approximately $100.00 per acre to raise sugar beets. Their average aver-age production last year was just a little better than thirty one hundred pounds per acre. The company itself is doing some experimental work to see which is the best fertilizer to use. They have found that where they used super phosphate they actually got a decrease in production. Their fertilizing program consists con-sists mostly of nitrogen wich is supplied by ammonium sulphate and nitrate of soda. Mr. Parker, who is in charge of the plant operation, showed us through the plant where they do the cleaning. Most of the cleaning machinery has been built by the company by Mr. Looinis who has been in the cleaning business for the last twenty years. They have purchased a oo-operative cannery which is sufficiently large to store all of their clean seed and the seed as it comes from the thresher before be-fore it is cleaned. Last year there was a million three hundred pounds of clean seed run through the plant. The percentage of clean out in the plant last year was twenty-live per cent. They had some from one of the threshers go es low as sixteen per cent. They feel that by more perfection of the threshers they will be able to cut down the clean out so that it will not go over twenty per" cent. They have special equipment equip-ment with which they Bay they can take out the seed that will not germinate. For exampM, they had one lot of seed which only ran seveTfteen per cent when it was cleaned and they ran it over in the machine and brought it up to sixty-five per cent. There was a small percentage of the good seed taken out with this machine but most of it was the seed which would not germinate. While at Hemet Mr. Farrar showed us the tunnel which is to bring the water from the Colorado river into Los Angeles. This tunnel is large enough in the pipe which is being erected so that two cars can drive side by side. Another interesting sight was a forty-acre plot of roses, all different seeds and varieties. This is the ' nursery of Howard Rose company. In another place they have sixty-five acres of rose cuttings planted which will be grafted to the desired varieties this fall. At noon at Hemet, Mr. Farrer had the group as guests for the Farrer-Loomis Seed company. We were taken to the hotel and given a wonderful banquet at which time the secretary of the Chamber Cham-ber of Commerce talked ' to us about the wonderlands of California Cali-fornia and welcomed us to come to California again with our seed growers. After leaving Hemet the group went to the San Diego Exposition. The next day we went through El Centrro, Imperial Valley, and Yuma over to Phoenix. This trip was rather warm, as tt was one hundred and twelve in the shade at Yuma. At Phoenix we got in touch with Harry A. Elcock, who is in charge of the beet seed growing of the Salt River Valley. This is first year that the Salt River Valley has raised sugar beet seed to any extent. For the last five years they have been growing grow-ing a few experimental plots to see how they would yield. Last year there was a ; total of nine acres in the Salt ' River Valley. This year they have eighteen hundred hun-dred and fifty acres planted. This is the same company that is rsd ing beets in Las Vegas, New Mexico Mex-ico and in Raswell. Mr. Elcock-' who is in charge at New V" ' has taken over the -rco. of the seed ' - management Talle" - in &e Salt River . These growers axe rais- rtg the beets tor the 'Great Western Wes-tern Sugar company, the Crystal Sugar company, Zt thC H.? company. They figure that tbe, grow eighty-five per cent of the beets grown in the United States. They not only raise th curley top resistant variety which we raise in Utah, but they are grow-U- six varieties this year, each variety iC meet certain requirements require-ments i'S ihe "ty where they are raised, "fh&gs pjoJL" wllch are of different YHfiettes re nted at least two miles apWrt 0 that there is no possible Afc of cross pollination. The fields are somewhat larger than they are in California and in Utah. One patch which we visited was one hundred fifty-five acres, one solid block of sugar beet seed. It is expected that this patch will yield three thousand five hundred pounds ta the acre. The man that owns this beet patch has four hundred fifty-five acres of seed this year. In the Salt River Valley they are trying new methods of harvesting harv-esting their beets. They are trying try-ing what they call the wlnow system to a limited extent, cutting cut-ting the beets with a machine smllar to a binder which has a conveyor on it and piles the beotB in a windrow. These beets are to be threshed by a combine which comes along and picks the beets out of the windrow and goes through the threshing machine ma-chine so that there will" bo no hand handling. Most of the boots are cut with power machines that have a special mower mads . which is forty Inches wide as Ithe beets are planted in twenty-inch twenty-inch rows. Besides the cutter bar which cuts the beets from the bottom they have a horizontal cutting bar which cuts the beots horizontal so that they will not shatter them as they are beirwr pulled apart to get ready for shocking. Practically all of the beets In Arizona will bo shocked and then put on to a skid and taken to the machine, tho same as we do in this locality. It was the opinion of Mr. El-cork El-cork that in Rome fields they had poor bolting due to the fact that they did not have sufficient water (Continued on page fire) BEET SEED (Continued from first page) I during the winter. He thinks 'that water should be applied constantly con-stantly from the time the beets are started growing until they I are matured. They tried pasturing pastur-ing beets in Arizona during the past year but found that it was not successful as they got a poor had been pastured. However, in stand and poor yield where beets New Mexico where the climate is somewhat different, pasturing has been done very successfully, and they think probably it may be done in this country. This however how-ever will have to be experimented on to some extent before the practice can be universally used. A new cleaning plant has been created this year which is similar simi-lar to the one that we have in St. George. Here all of the seed is blended so as to give about an eighty per cent germination which is required, they blend that seed with some of the other seed which has a higher germination, then the grower has a poorer germination is not cut for having hav-ing a poorer germination test and all are given the same price for their seed, if there is enough high germination seed so 'that they can blend and bring it all up to eighty per cent. From Phoenix the group left and came back to St. George by way of Flagstaff and Lee's Ferry bridge, arriving in St. George . Sunday evening. |