Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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A Hectare Of Good Soil, Sown Or Planted
With Beet-Root, Produces In France From Ten To Thirty Thousand
Kilogrammes Of Beet-Root.
The mean fertility is 20,000 kilogrammes,
which furnish 2 1/2 per cent, or five hundred kilogrammes of coarse
sugar.
Now, one hundred kilogrammes of that sugar yield fifty
kilogrammes of refined sugar, thirty of sugar vergeoise, and twenty of
muscovade; consequently, a hectare of beet-root produces 250
kilogrammes of refined sugar.
A short time before my arrival at the Havannah there had been sent
from Germany some specimens of beet-root sugar which were said to
menace the existence of the Sugar Islands in America. The planters had
learned with alarm that it was a substance entirely similar to
sugar-cane, but they flattered themselves that the high price of
labour in Europe and the difficulty of separating the sugar fit for
crystallization from so great a mass of vegetable pulp would render
the operation on a grand scale little profitable. Chemistry has, since
that period, succeeded in overcoming those difficulties; and, in the
year 1812, France alone had more than two hundred beet-root sugar
factories working with very unequal success and producing a million of
kilogrammes of coarse sugar, that is, a fifty-eighth part of the
actual consumption of sugar in France. Those two hundred factories are
now reduced to fifteen or twenty, which yield a produce of 300,000
kilogrammes.* (* Although the actual price of cane-sugar not refined
is 1 franc 50 cents the kilogramme, in the ports, the production of
beetroot-sugar offers a still greater advantage in certain localities,
for instance, in the vicinity of Arras.
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