The whole Ribot family is busy all summer in the fields. With the horses, Pierre cultivates the beets and potatoes. His wife and the children hoe them and pull out the weeds from between the plants. They all work together cut ting the wheat, oats, and hay, and hauling them to the barn in the village.
322. Life in the the people come back from the fields in the evening, Jean leads the horses out to the town pump to drink, while Susanne helps her mother to get supper, and carries buckets of water from the pump to the house. There is only one well in all the village. Each family must send there for water, and often the children play a game of tag around the pump before starting back home. Jean and his father feed the horses and milk the cows. Twice a week the mother makes delicious sweet butter by churning the cream in a hand churn. Some French butter goes to England. The English people are very fond ' of bread and butter and jam, and they buy butter from the farmers of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and even of western Siberia, a country away to the east of Russia, beyond the Ural Mountains.
323. The sugar harvest.—By Septem ber the Ribots have picked up all the pota toes and planted the potato field to wheat. Then they harvest the sugar beets. These big sweet roots are a foot long, and their green leafy tops stretch in long straight rows across the field, with narrow strips of brown earth showing between the rows. The tops are cut off and taken to the barn for the cows to eat in the winter time. The beets are pulled up and hauled, day after day, to the sugar factory in a town a few miles away. There they are washed
clean and thrown into a slicing machine. This cuts them into little pieces, and the sugary juice is all soaked out in warm water. Some of the beets are so good that there is one pound of sugar for every five pounds of roots. In the big factory the water and juice are put through many vats, boilers, pipes, and pans. Finally the sugar comes out with gxactly the same form and flavor as the sugar from sugar cane.
Many wagons are at the factory bringing beets. Pierre sees some friends he hasn't seen since he hauled beets the year before. He goes home in the evening with a load of beet pulp, which the cows are glad to eat even if the sugar has been soaked out of it.
324. Beet sugar in other countries.— Sugar beets grow in many countries. Women, girls, and boys are working in fields of beets on thousands of farms in the level plains of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. Some of the Polish and Russian farmers grow beets too, and they are also grown now in the United States. The beets like a cooler summer than corn does. Therefore we do not find them in our Corn Belt, but on the farms of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, Idaho, and California. Beets are also grown in parts of Wiscon sin and Michigan, to the north of the corn district. Many of the people who work in the American beet fields learned how to grow beets in Europe. Sugar was very scarce in 1920 because European beet suer crops were small on account of the war.