Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
growers to sign annual contracts for the production of sugar beets, which
set a price in advance for beets delivered to the company at the end of the
season. Ideally, Spreckels would sign enough contracts with growers each
year to provide enough beets for the factory to operate at full capacity for
about 120 days, generally from the end of August until mid-December
(Pioda,
History
). In practice, however, the company struggled to get enough
beets from the very start.
The year of the Salinas factory's completion, 1898, was a drought year,
and only 7,200 acres of beets were harvested. For this fi rst year, Spreckels
decided not to open the Salinas factory but to ship beets to the Watsonville
factory for processing (Pioda,
History
). This false start was just the fi rst of
many problems for the nascent sugar beet industry in the Salinas Valley.
Perhaps the most important, at fi rst, was the pattern of rainfall. Rainfall
around Salinas averages from 10 to 15 inches per year, most of which falls
from November to April; during the summer months, little rain falls. Sugar
beet growers found that conditions were too dry through the summer for
a good crop, and yields varied considerably from year to year, contingent
on the amount of rain. Also, a disease of sugar beets called beet blight was
often prevalent and did great damage to each year's crop. By 1903 the
company decided to abandon beet farming on one tenant ranch simply
because beet blight was prevalent there every year (Pioda,
History
).
Spreckels's diffi culties in getting beets and keeping the factory in produc-
tion are illustrated in fi gure 4.1, which depicts the yearly harvest of beets
and days of factory operation for the fi rst few decades of the twentieth
century.
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Prior to 1914 beet acreage in the valley never exceeded 20,000
acres, far from the 30,000 acres mentioned in the 1898 USDA report. Until
1918 the number of days the factory was open to process beets tracked
the number of acres planted in the valley quite closely, and in many
years the factory was only open for 60-80 days. Starting in the late 1910s
and through the 1920s, Spreckels was able to ship beets from other growing
areas to process at the Salinas plant, and this accounts for more stability
in the number of plant operating days. In fact, even when the acreage of
sugar beets grown in the valley virtually disappeared in the years 1928
through 1931, because of a major shift to vegetable crops, the plant was
still able to operate for about 100 days each year. However, this meant that
the Salinas factory processed beets at the expense of other Spreckels
plants.
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