Word: beets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week a new development was re ported which may solve the industry's labor problem and make beet-growing selfsupporting: scientists had learned how to get single beet seeds. The American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists' was jubilant. Thanks to the seed-splitting dis covery, beet growing would be largely mechanized in 1944. The beet-sugar pro duction quota had been upped 50%. One big beet man exulted: "The beet-sugar industry will soon compete with sugar cane - without coolie labor!" The man who split the beet seed is Roy Bainer, an agriculture teacher at the University...
This machine failed to set the walnut industry afire, but attracted the attention of the beet-sugar people. The U.S. Beet Sugar Assn. (western processors) put Professor Bainer in charge of a $100,000 study of beet-growing methods...
...beet-seed cluster may have as many as six seed germs, and plants grow so close together that the only practical thinning method is with the fingers or with short-handled hoes. Reducing the seed clusters to single seeds had baffled many previous experimenters. Plant breeding had failed. Bainer tried grinding the clusters, but that did not work. Then one day a cluster accidentally slipped under a steel bar. The bar's pressure cracked open both the cluster and Bainer's problem...
Upshot was a machine with a grinding wheel that pushes beet-seed clusters against a "shearing bar." This breaks up the cluster at its natural cell divisions. The cracked-off single seeds, when planted, need no thinning...
Last year 330,000 out of 552,000 western sugar-beet acres were planted with sheared seed. Estimated labor saving: 3,000,000 man hours. This year sheared seed will be used for the entire western region (expected acreage: 1,000,000). Bainer has developed other labor-saving machines for planting and harvesting; he expects to eliminate 90% of the hand labor...