Western Sugar Co-Op rings in centennial year with biggest haul yet

After a century of turning sugar beets into sugar, Western Sugar Co-op has got the science down to an art. As they approach the end of processing last season’s harvest, the co-op is set to have its biggest haul in recent years, possibly ever, according to factory manager Shannon Ellis.

Last fall, Big Horn Basin’s 17,000 acres of sugar beet fields yielded 28.9 tons per acre on average with sugar content at 17.99 percent. That led to a grand total of 491,300 tons of very sweet sugar beets for the 2015 harvest.

It was one of the best harvests the Basin has had in years, said Ric Rodriguez, a Powell farmer and vice-chairman of the Western Sugar Cooperative Board of Directors.

Now those sweet beets are nearly done being processed. It’s typically done by Feb. 10, but this year went into the first week of March, Rodriguez said. Part of this was due to a great harvest, repairs along the way and added processing from the Billings facility.

The sugar beet harvest was longer than usual too, starting on Sept. 2 and going through Nov. 6 for a total of 43 days spent digging up beets once days off were factored in.

A sweet century

The Lovell factory still maintains some of its original facilities and others picked up over the decades. Some additions are a bit more high tech than what was used 100 years ago — but the end product remains the same.

The evaporators used to be vertical; now they’re horizontal and more efficient, and the slicers have a new approach as well, slicing beets into what looks like waffle fries.

The facility used to have a main engine that ran the pumps and other equipment, a main shaft with a belt going to the pump and a boiler to keep everything going, Ellis said. Now it’s a more sophisticated and environmentally friendly process.

“We have a newer way of doing it,” Ellis said. “A lot fewer employees are needed because of automation.”

The factory is able to slice up about 3,000 tons of beets per day and averages around 2,900 tons of beets daily.

 “They didn’t make much sugar years and years ago,” Ellis said, estimating it was around 600 hundredweights (33.6 tons) a day compared to today’s 8,500 hundredweights (476 tons).

In all, the factory is set to produce 1.4 million hundredweights (78.4 tons) of sugar this year.

“That could be a record — I went back the last 10 years and we haven’t made that much,” Ellis said. “The beet quality came in here exceptional and had a lot of sugar in it. And, the way the beets went into the pile and the way it stored was extraordinary.”

Not only was the harvest big, the industry’s impact was large last year as well.

The Lovell plant alone brings an economic impact of $33.7 million — about $20 million of which goes directly to local sugar beet growers, Rodriguez said. 

Western Sugar’s total impact is $346 million between payroll, grower payments, purchases and property taxes across all of its six factories.

The mild winter weather kept the beets stable during longterm storage as they awaited their turn for processing.

The extraction efficiency runs around 84-85 percent, Ellis said. That means for every 100 pounds of sugar within the sugar beets that come in, the plant produces 85 pounds of sugar.

“That is better than most factories in the country,” Rodriguez said.

To celebrate its centennial, the co-op plans on participating in Lovell Days and having a float in parades, Ellis said.

Once processing is done, the co-op will have some infrastructure put in, replace some steel, cement floors, pumps, heaters and filters, Ellis said.

“We have six months downtime to get everything going again,” Ellis said, noting he really appreciates the work the factory crew and the sugar growers put in to making the co-op’s success possible.