Excerpt from Special Report on the Beet-Sugar Industry in the United States Mr. President: In a communication which I addressed to the Vice-President on the 17th of last January, in obedience to a resolution of the United States Senate, on the subject of sugar importation, production, etc., I made the following statement: Sugar will be grown in the United States by farmers. The Department of Agriculture has been experimenting in two-thirds of the States of the Union during the past year, and will experiment in all the States during the coming year, to ascertain where we can grow sugar-producing plants most profitably. A detailed report now being prepared for Congress will show the results of tho work. I now have the honor to transmit, for your information and that of the Congress of the United States, that portion of the detailed report above referred to covering the subject of beet sugar. For the convenience of its readers, I have divided it into two distinct parts, one part consisting of the report of the Chemist of this Department, Dr. H. W. Wiley, who for many years, and until the work was intermitted for a few years preceding my assumption of office, was in charge of the sugar-experiment work, which has formed the basis of most of the work undertaken by private enterprise in this important industry. The second part consists of tho report of the field agent, Mr. Charles F. Saylor, appointed May 10, 1897, who has personally visited during the past season every State and locality mentioned in his report, inspecting sugar-beet plantations and beet-sugar factories and interviewing the practical growers and manufacturers. During the past five years the people of the United States have paid to foreign producers over half a billion dollars for imported sugar. The total domestic product for 1897 was 335,656 tons, the total refined product of beet sugar 1,760,607 tons, making the total consumption for that year 2,096,263 tons. Of the total consumption of sugar in the United States in 1897, 15 per cent was beet sugar. As the production of beet sugar in the United States in 1897 was barely 121/2 per cent of the total domestic product, it follows that the percentage of beet sugar imported last year to the entire sugar imports must have been considerably over 45. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.