Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1894 — Profit in Beet Sugar. [ARTICLE]

Profit in Beet Sugar.

San Francisco Examiner. Richard Gird, the owner of the Chino ranch, San Bernardino county, and the principal owner of the snonnous beet sugar factory at Chico, is at the Occidental. He says beet sugar making is a great success. About $300,000 worth of improved machinery, including the Steffens process of extracting sugar from the beet molasses, has recently been put in, making the plant cost fullysl,-000,000. There are, Mr. Gird says, 4,000 acres of beets on the Chino ranch and 2,000 more in the vicinity. The crop will amount to about 55,000 or 60,000 tons. It would have reached 100,000 but for the dry weather. He says there is money in beet growing. The gross value per acre of the product of the beet land is from SBO to S9O, and the net profit from S3O to S4O an acre. Last year he got 174,000 pounds of the best seed from abroad. Mostly from France. This ..cost $20,000. “There is enough good beet land in California, from San Francisco south, to supply sugar for the whole world,” said Mr. Gird. “The consumption ,is increasing fast. Two years ago we used on this coast 90,000 tons of sugar. We are now using seventy pounds to each person on the coast.”