With 73 percent of the crop delivered as of Monday, growers in Western Sugar Cooperative’s Lovell Factory District are on track to post the first-ever average yield over 30 tons to the acre.
Rain and snow in the first few days of October cost …
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Record harvest 73 percent done
Forget about the soggy start. The story of the 2016 area sugar beet harvest is the soaring finish.
With 73 percent of the crop delivered as of Monday, growers in Western Sugar Cooperative’s Lovell Factory District are on track to post the first-ever average yield over 30 tons to the acre.
Rain and snow in the first few days of October cost growers almost a week to muddy fields. But when the fields dried, digging resumed, and beets literally flew out of the ground.
Meanwhile, piles at receiving stations around the district grew and grew. With the harvest complete on nearly three-quarters of the district’s 16,200 acres, grower yields have averaged a whopping 31.4 tons to the acre. That’s two and a half tons to the acre higher than forecast by late summer sampling.
At the same time, sugar content at 17.08 percent is running a little lower than the projected 17.5 percent.
“That usually happens when you get a little moisture,” said Heart Mountain grower Ric Rodriguez, vice president of the Western Sugar Cooperative board of directors. “You’ll see sugar content down a little and tonnage up.”
A similar story is being written in Western Sugar’s Yellowstone Valley in Montana. With 65 percent of the beet acreage harvested in the Billings District, the yield to date is a fantastic 37.25 tons to the acre.
Growers in the Emblem area have had to overcome an untimely equipment failure at the Western Sugar receiving station there. The collapse of a scale forced Emblem growers to haul beets additional distance to Willwood or the factory receiving station at Lovell for a time. A temporary scale is in place now.
If favorable harvest weather of the last three weeks continues, the remainder of the 2016 beet crop could be delivered to district stations by the end of the month.