Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 February 1901 — A SUGAR BEET INDUSTRY. [ARTICLE]

A SUGAR BEET INDUSTRY.

A Big Factory Will Be Located at Shelby This Season. A big beet sugar factory will be erected at Shelby, twenty miles north of Rensselaer, this year. The men interested in the enterprise have organized a large stock company with an estimated capital of $2,000,000 and the contract for a $500,000 factory is said to have already been let to the Dyer company of Cleveland. W. R. Shelby, of Grand Rapids, Mich., vice president of the Grand Rapids and Indiana railroad and owner of several thousand acres of land in the vicinity nf Shelby, is president of the new company. Several New York capitalists are also largely interested, which makes the company unuaully strong, financially. The Central Sugar company, which is the tide of the new concern, will offer the farmer the choice of the two contracts. One guarantees him $4.25 a ton for the beets regardless of their saccharine qualites, and the other runs the price from $4 20 to $6.50 and over, owing to the percent of sugar they contain. Beets raised in that region have been tested and found to contain about fifteen per cent and at that rate would command a price of five dollars per ton.