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Show I POTATO PRODUCTION I Professor George Stewart, Utah Experiment Station Potatoes wore the first crop planted in Utah. In July 1817. the Mormon pioneers turned the water from City Creek ovor tho parched land near what js now the center of Salt Lake Citly. The ground was then broken and sown at once to potatoes. Only a small yield was obtained but this helped help-ed materially to eke out the meager lood supply until the harvest of 1S4S. In the several hard years that followed, follow-ed, tire potato crop was one of the most important, if the not the most important source of food for the pioneer pion-eer settlers. Ever since, Utah has !' f grown potatoes and is now rapidly in-i in-i creasing its acreage. No other vegetable in Utah is so widely grown and so regularly con-i con-i ! sumed for food. The high acre-yield and the relativo ease of cultivation li make it a profitable crop both for the I: home consumption and for market. , l Responding readily to the ititensivo cultivation mat must accompany nigu-oriced nigu-oriced land and irrigation, potatoes are an ideal food crop for the inter mountain country. Not only for human hu-man consumption but as feed for livestock, live-stock, they possess .great intrinsic alue. Considerable quantities may. therefore, be produced even at long distances from market or from the railroad. Natural adaptation and Ion cxpori- Icnce in growing potatoes have mado production successful. This is shown ( in the regularly increasing acre-yield Notwithstanding, this, however, there is vast room for further improvement.' Better preparation of seedbeds, morel careful selection, bettor methods of; disease control, and wiser irrigation i are all comparatively simple and inexj pensive; yet they would greatly in- trease both the yield and the quality of Utah's potato crop. This is truei I not only on farms that grow potatoes j I almost entirely for home consumption; i but on those farms which grow truck I 1 potatoes for city markets and also on I those wich produce sufficient quantl-J ties of the general crop for interstate! shipment. All growers in this section can improve in some phase of potato production, most of them in several. No known region has yet made such; progress in potato growing as to havej no more lessons to learn. To this rule the farmers of Utah are not an exception. |