A Smallholder's Success
An extraordinary tribute to the virtue of a particular bit of English soil and climate was paid incidentally last week, at a meeting of sugar beet farmers in London. Nearly five hundred were present and many parts of the country represented. They all rose to cheer the winner of the chief prize of the day, who was a smallholder from Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire. His achievement was astonishing in more ways than one. He won the same prize last year, and grew his beet on the very same patch of ground without any inter- mediate rotation. He grew rather over 20 tons to the acre of regular beet of a high percentage of sugar. He means to take a third crop off the same piece, and thinks he will do better still by help of a little wider spacing of his plants. Other points emerge. He used seed grown in Norfolk, and Norfolk seed has won the chief prizes for five years in suc- cession: thanks, perhaps and in part, to the late Mr. Charles Marsters of King's Lynn, who was a pioneer of the introduction of French, Belgian and Swedish seeds to England.
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