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Show 1904] PRODUCTS Si making in 1830, but was of little consequence for a long time, the annual output of beet- sugar not reaching one thousand tons until 1888. It rose to forty thousand tons within ten years. It requires a very different climate from the cane, its ideal area being a belt about two hundred miles wide stretching from New York to the Dakotas, then passing to the Mexican border, and north and west to include the whole of California and about half of Oregon and Washington. 1 While insignificant as yet beside the European supply, the increase is very rapid, the sugar produced in 1902a being six times the quantity only four years before. Of hay, sixty million tons was the total for 1902. New York raises over one- tenth of the whole from five million acres, and Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Michigan follow in the order named. Besides this a vast quantity of grass is of course consumed as pasturage, alike in the east and on the great ranches in the west and southwest. ^ Tie greatest of all crops in the south is cotton. There is much doubt as to whtether some variety of it was not known to the natives of Peru and Mexico before the coming of Europeans, but\ its culture in the United States almost certainly dates from the year of the settlement of Jamestown. It 1 Wiley, The Sugar Beet ( U. S. Dcpt. Agric, Farmers* Bulletin, 1899. 5*)- a U. S. Dept. Agric, Year- Book, 190a, p. 825. |