The committee of dairymen appointed at the late meeting of the Illinois Dairymen's Association did not present themselves at the State Board meeting to confer about holding a dairy exhibit either at the State Fair or the Fat Stock Show, as instructed to do. No explanation of the failure was made. The State Board, however, to leave nothing undone to establish its desire to meet the dairymen half way or more, appointed a committee consisting of Messrs. David, Chester, and Griffith, to confer with the DeKalb committee, in Chicago, at some convenient time to be agreed upon.
It was decided to hold the next Illinois State Fair at Chicago the week beginning September 8th, and the Fat Stock Show at the Exposition Building, Chicago, beginning November 11th.
SORGHUM AT WASHINGTON.
Prof. Wiley, of the Department of Agriculture at Washington, will soon issue his report upon the sorghum business of 1883. Newspaper correspondents have been permitted to make a digest of the report. He pronounces erroneous the prevalent impression that every farmer may become his own sugar-maker. Sorghum, unlike sugar beet, contains various non-crystallizable sugars, the separation of which demands much skill and scientific knowledge. Sorghum-sugar will have to be made in large factories. The existing factories have shown that it can be made, but how profitably or unprofitably can not be stated by Prof. Wiley, who suggests that farmers near factories may, in effect, make their own sugar by raising the cane and trading it at factories for sugar. Cane giving sixty pounds of sugar per ton ought to bring the farmer thirty-five pounds, the rest of the sugar and molasses going to the manufacturer to pay expenses and yield profit. The profitableness of making sugar from sorghum depends largely on utilizing all waste products. The scums and sediments make manure hardly inferior to guano. Bagasse, or crushed cane, can be turned into manure by being thrown into hog-pens, as at Rio Grande, N.J., or it will make a fair quality of printing paper. It is not economical to burn it. If the manufacture of sorghum-sugar is proved to be profitable, it will result in supplying to a large extent our demand for sugar, but as sorghum makes a great deal more molasses in proportion to sugar than sugar-cane does, the Professor concludes that when there is enough sugar there will be a great deal more molasses than can be disposed of.
Prof. Wiley has made experimentally some fair samples of rum and alcohol from sorghum molasses. Under favorable circumstances one gallon of molasses weighing eleven pounds would give 2.75 pounds absolute alcohol, 3.03 pounds of 90 per cent, and 5.5 whisky or rum. Thus each gallon of molasses would give nearly half a gallon of commercial alcohol and two thirds of a gallon of whisky or rum. As it has been abundantly proved, he says, that sugar can be made from sorghum, the Government should make no further experiments in this direction. Prof. Wiley has tried the diffusion process, and finds it yields 20 per cent more sugar, but at a somewhat higher cost than grinding. The Government, he thinks, should purchase machinery for large experiments in the diffusion process, and should raise its cane somewhere else than near Washington, as land there is expensive and not adapted to the purpose. The Government should also make arrangements with agricultural colleges or other agencies in various States for experimenting with sorghum-culture to determine what parts of the country are most favorable to the culture of sugar-producing plants. Prof. Wiley suggests in each State the trial of two acres divided into ten plots—five for sorghum, four for beets, and one for corn—to test for purposes of comparison the general fertility of the soil and the character of the season. The Government ought to carry on for a series of years the process of selection of sorghum seed in order to secure an improvement in the quality of the cane.
THE COLD SPELL.
The cold weather of last week seems to have extended over nearly the entire North American Continent. Nothing for severity has been known to equal it during a long series of years. East, West, North, and South it was all the same, differing in degree of course, but uniformly colder than scarce ever known in the same latitude.
The greatest loss to stock so far as heard from was in that in transit to market. On some of the roads the losses were heavy. A dispatch from Independence, Mo., says a train of fifteen cars, loaded with mules from Texas via the Iron Mountain and Southern road, arrived there on the 5th, when it was discovered that at least 100 of the mules had frozen to death, and the others were in a freezing condition. The mules were two years old and direct from grass. They had been three days without food.