Beet Seed Split

Sugar beets were big news last week -;under the heads of science, business and politics. Beets might long ago have supplied the U.S. with all the sugar it needs but for one stubborn fact -sugar-beet seeds grow in clusters. From the clustered seeds grow clustered plants, which must be thinned by hand. The enormous labor required has given the production advantage to sugar cane and made the beet-sugar industry a notoriously uneconomic enterprise, heavily subsidized by low wages and high tariffs. Supporting this $100,000,000 industry has cost the U.S. people about $300,000,000 a year in direct subsidies and sugar prices upped by tariffs.

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 of California. Professor Bainer had been teaching and tinkering at Cal's agricultural experiment station in Davis since 1929. One of his inventions is a ma chine for cracking English walnuts. On a conveyer belt, the nuts pass under a buzz saw which nicks holes in them; next they get an injection of oxygen and acetylene and move on to a flame which explodes the shells. The nut meat drops neatly into a hopper.

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.

A 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.

If Bainer's seed splitting enables the beet to compete honestly with cane, it may have a drastic effect on the entire economy of some cane-producing countries.

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