this sugar tasted "awful". In order to overcome the problems of the "free sugar" from Asia, the "Beet Sugar Society of Philadelphia" was founded in 1836. It promoted cottage-produced beet sugar as an alternative to the slave-produced cane sugar from the West Indies. All pre-1870 movement failed, primarily because it approached the subject with naïve optimism and without sufficient capital. An attempt in Utah by the LDS Church-owned Deseret Manufacturing Company in the 1850s was carefully planned and funded, but failed due to saline soil conditions. After many failures, E. H. Dyer acquired a defunct sugar factory in Alvarado, California (now Union City) in 1879, and succeeded in making sugar in commercially viable amounts. It was soon joined by the Western Beet Sugar Company in Watsonville The Oxnard brothers brought sugar beet cultivation to the plains, when they opened a factory in Grand Island, Nebraska. In Utah, Arthur Stayner and others were able to convince LDS Church leaders to support a second attempt. It led to the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, which had Dyer built its factory in Lehi, Utah in 1890. Capital investment in factories demanded an adequate supply of sugar beets. In central Colorado and western Nebraska, this was provided substantially by Germans from Russia who were already expert at sugar beet farming when they immigrated in large numbers circa 1890–1905. The United States now also began to catch up with Europe in research. The work of Rachel Lloyd at the University of Nebraska in the late 1880s resulted in a large production increase in the state of Nebraska. By 1914, the sugar beet industry in the US matched the production of its European counterparts. The largest producers of beet sugar in the US were California, Utah, and Nebraska until the outbreak of World War II. In California, Japanese Americans were an important constituent in farming and production. When they were interned during World War II, California's beet sugar production stalled, and was largely shifted to inland states such as Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Utah. In many of the regions where new sugar beet farms were started during the war, farmers were unfamiliar with beet sugar cultivation, so they hired Japanese-American workers from internment camps who were familiar with sugar beet production to work on the farms. Sugar beets are grown in 11 states and represent 50-55% of the US domestic sugar production. Sugarcane accounts for about 45%