THE SUGAR PLANT.
A novelty at the Royal Show at Harrogate—happily attended by Argentine buyers and many Australians—was an exhibit by the joint sugar factories. Mr. Noel Buxton, the new Minister of Agriculture, seemed particularly interested in it, as well he might be. The land under sugar-beet is greater by 58,000 acres than last year. The factories have full supplies of their raw material, and a good many farmers have been saved by the crop. Every new crop needs a tradition, and producers in England are only now beginning to realize first what an immense amount of fodder, exclusive of the sugar root, is produced—the leaves and fragments of adhering root may exceed a heavy hay crop. Second, they have had ocular evidence of the effect on the succeeding crop. This is due, as: some excellent photographs illustrated, more to the mechanical effect of the long tapering root than to the manures. It breaks• the subsoil, leaves rootlets behind, and makes available a new strata of soil-richness.
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