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Show oo UTAH PRODUCING SUPERIOR SUGAR BEET SEED. When the war broke up, there was fear that our beet sugar industry would suffer a severe depression through failure to obtain suger beet seed. This country had been almost wholly dependent on Germany for seed, and, with tho blockade in full force, that avenue seemed closed. But a shipment or two were allowed to get through, and the industry was saved from paralysis. The crisis served to impress American beet sguar companies compa-nies with tho insecurity they invited by depending almost solely on foreign sources of seed, and among the companies com-panies that resolved to do their own seed raising was the Amalgamated Sugar of Ogden. Since then the local company has looked to the Agricul- luraj college 10 noun vie way iui firmly establishing the propagating of seed, with the encouraging report of marked progress A bulletin from the Logan college says an increase of 10,000 has been granted in the agricultural appropriation appropria-tion act of 1917 for aiding in the de- vclopment and improvement of American Ameri-can strains of sugar beet seed and especially for the establishment of a permanent sugar beet Beed Industry in the United States. Most of the work done in the United States in the breeding of sugar beet seed has been done by the United States department of agriculture, the experiment station of tho Utah Agricultural Agri-cultural college, and the North Dakota Da-kota experiment station. Tho Utah station has gono beyond the work of breeding the seed and has demonstrated that it can be produced in quantities for commercial purposes. In 1902, at the same time that the United St'atos government began the study of sugar beet seed, the Utah station sta-tion took up the work. After countless count-less experiments and tests, covering nine years, they were able to announce that they had bred up a 6train of sugar beet seed superior to any of the European strains in productivity and sugar content of tho resulting crop. This statement was corroborated by several sugar companies who found that greater yield per acre of beets with higher sugar content resulted from using Utah seed. In 1911, when a superior strain of seed had been secured, the problem was to produce the seed In "commercial "commer-cial quantities. Since then the Utah station has been working upon this problem and it has now bean demonstrated demon-strated that a superior sugar beet seed can be produced in quantities sufficient suffi-cient to supply the demand of the factories fac-tories of this country. The results obtained by the college experts, upon an experimental scalo, have all been corroborated by these companies In a largo way. |