Animal, vegetable, mineral

is it

nimal?

Sure is. Human family, and a very special breed of humans at that. (Americans, Western-type.)

COPYRIGHT, 19!5!5, THE GREAT WESTERN SUGAR COMPANY

,J,.~'''

~~

is it iegetahle?

Dorndest vegetable-eater you ever saw! Its "main dish" is a plant which converts our famous Rocky Mountain sunshine and sparkling snow-water into human energy almost twice as efficiently as other plants do.

is it mineral?

This, too. In one year, for example, it eats up enough coal and limestone to fill a freight train longer than

from Denver to Cheyenne_.

can it he located geographically?

·

All over the western map. Ask any farmer, craftsman, merchant, school man, or banker in northern Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and western Nebraska how deeply its roots feed his community.

is it agricultural?

Profoundly. It's the foundation of irrigated agriculture in the four-state region just mentioned.

is it manufacturing?

Significantly. Through it, skilled Western workmen put Western raw materials into finished form before shipment to population centers east and south, leaving a golden

i it

research?

Constantly. It has led the region, often the world, in developing new techniques to relieve the farmer's aching back,

You bet it is. (Say, what sort of many-sided creature is this, anyway?)

is it transportation?

Up to its ears. In 1953, it paid a bill of more than $10,000,000 for freight shipments alone.

is it a cotnbination of

a\\ tbese tbin1s1

'I

ou',e wo,m now-<>', o• ou< youn9•'•" ,oy It th.,. doy•, "Real Cool!"

Then it must be ...

The Great Western Sugar Company

~----Twenty factories ... The "basic industry" of its

ea Western

.!!

a r ilroader

Beets and sugar are heavy freight. Each acre of sugar beets means $62 in direct payments, plus an estimated $15 in indirect revenue to the railroads.

Every fall, thousands of freight cars gather at 245 GW beet dumps between Denver and the Canadian bprder to begin the haul of as much as 3,000,000 tons of fresh-harvested beets to GW factories. Throughout the year there is steady traffic in refined sugar, coal, limerock, supplies, and livestock fattened on beet by-products. The Company's own Great Western Railway operates in northern Colorado.

Youngsters are fascinated by the squat, busy, little "Betsy locos" chuffing about near the factories. Having paid out nearly $300,000,000 for freight in its first 50 years, Great Western is indeed a railroader!

Great Western

~

a miner

Approximately one pound of coal and one-third of a pound of limestone are consumed by SJ sugar factory to produce one pound of sugar. In a half-century, Great Western has purchased more than 18,000,000. tons of coal (enough to fill a freight train 4,000

miles long) from Rocky Mountain mines. The GW limestone quarry at Horse Creek, Wyoming, provides a year-round payroll for 72 men.

The company is a large-scale consumer of natural gas and oil products. It serves farmers who use more than 55,000,000 pounds of phosphates and other mineral fertilizer each year. The GW farm mechanization program has provided a vastly in-creased market for all petroleum products.

Purity of that GW sugar is assured by the largest research organi-zation maintained by any beet sugar producer. In any Great Western factory, graduate chemists and other technicians make more than 800 tests each 24-hour day to assure the surpassing quality of GW sugar. Out of the continuous explorations of GW scientists have come two multi-million-dollar monuments to indus-trial progress located at Johnstown, Colorado:

In 1926, the world's first commercially successful factory for extraction of sugar from molasses hitherto unrecoverable by tradi-tional methods.

And now, in 1955, a brand-new plant manufacturing mono-sodium glutamate-MSG to make your food taste better. That's another of many GW "firsts" in the western sugar industry.

Great Western is a manufacturer

-An efficient one. Through supplemental and unique processes, Great Western now extracts a greater percentage of sugar from the sugar beet than does any other manufacturer. The entire in-dustry has benefited through Great Western's constant pioneering of new techniques and equipment.

But Great Western, to its home communities, is something more than a manufacturer in the usual sense. Over the past half century the coming of the sugar factory brought not only large industrial payrolls-some $289,000,000-to a score of rural com-munities, but also circulated cash payments to beet farmers at the rate of more than $1,500,000 a month-a steady revenue of basic importance to the economy of the entire region.

Great Western is a farmer

Irrigation authorities describe the sugar beet as "the economic backbone of western irrigated agriculture" ... "the crop that brought modern farming practice to the West." Since 1905, Great Western growers have been paid more than ONE BILLION DOL-LARS for beets alone. (That's 6½ times the value of all the gold

ever dug at Leadville and Central City combined!) GW'S

experiment station, oldest and largest in the industry, has scored many achievements in improvement of the sugar beet itself, and in making America entirely independent of foreign seed supplies. The "best-informed of all farmers"-GW growers-are served by 80 full-time GW field men. Since 1946 these growers have led the world in their conversion from manual to mechanized harvest-ing. And .now, thanks to the GW Thinner, thousands of acres are thinned without old-fashioned hoe and finger work.

Great Western is a cattle-feeder

The sugar beet is two crops in one. Besides nearly 5,000 pounds of

sugar, an acre of sugar beets produces beet-tops, pulp and molasses which alone contain more feed value for livestock than standard crops which could have been grown on that acre. Beet by-products form the basis of the most efficient western livestock feeding, responsible for hundreds of carloads of finished "reputa-tion" beef yearly, and enabling feeders in Great Western terri-tory to winter-fatten more lambs than any other area in the United States.

Great Western has constantly encouraged the widest possible animal feeding on local farms, so that barnyard fertilizer may be returned to the soil. This is conservation of the truest and most effective sort.

Great

W

fern

i

taxpayer

Since its founding, Great Western has paid more than $34,000,000 in tax revenue toward the education of our youth and the support of local government in the factory communities alone, exclusive of Denver. In fourteen of those communities, Great Western's tax payment over the years 1929-54 has averaged from 20% to as high as 56% of all taxes paid in the factory school district!

Since 1933, processing taxes levied on Great Western pro-duction have totalled $85,000,000, enabling Uncle Sam to make government payments to the beet growers in our territory without cost to the consumer.

Great

W

esterd is a community-builder

Mere presence of an industry does not assure maximum community

growth and prosperity. Much depends upon policy. By its low

-price, wide-distribution policy on beet by-products-by its decen-tralized payrolls-by its use of local banking and other business facilities-by its maintenance of a large agricultural field staff-and in a dozen other important ways, Great Western from the very first has chosen to stake its future upon the over-all welfare of its home communities.

Now, as the West booms along into a new golden era sur-passing anything of its past, The Great Western Sugar Company takes deep pride in having been able to provide a foundation upon which so much of today's growth and community prosperity has been built.

Great Western is a

f

outh sponsor

The West is still young. And The Great Western Sugar Company

knows that today's lively youth can and will build future achieve-ments far beyond those of the past half century. For this reason Great Western maintains the closest relations with educational institutions throughout the region.

For 19 years, GW-sponsored competitions among several hundred 4-H youngsters and Future Farmers of A~erica members annually have encouraged the most effective training of youth in up-to-date farming and animal husbandry. This training always stresses the practical: by signing actual beet contracts and keeping close records, the contestants learn commercially profitable methods.

Great We tern is a salesm

Sales "firsts" are common at Great Western. GW led the beet industry, for example, in the introduction of brown sugar and

certain other specialty sugars. (You may now buy GW sugar in

any one of nineteen grades and packages!) GW pioneered bulk

carload shipment of sugar to industrial users, was first to use bulk bin storage of refined sugar, first in numerous other modern distri· bution methods.

Many of the nation's most famous bakers and candy-makers

use GW sugar exclusively. And housewives from the Rockies to

Indiana and the South have learned by experience to depend upon the GW brand for every household sugar need.