Sugar beet harvest wraps up with higher yields and sweeter crops

When hard work and Mother Nature teamed up for this year’s sugar beet harvest, the outcome was bigger and sweeter than expected. Yields and sugar content were at nearly record highs.

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 for a grand total of 491,300 tons of very sweet sugar beets.

“That is the best sugar we’ve had in years here,” said Ric Rodriguez, a Powell farmer and vice-chairman of the Western Sugar Cooperative Board of Directors.

Last year’s harvest brought in about 28 tons per acre with sugar content around 17 percent. Some days, the harvest brought in sugar beets with sugar contents as high as 19 percent, which is very uncommon, said Powell farmer Fred Hopkin.

The only bump in the road was a weeklong delay in harvesting in October due to the unseasonably warm weather. No harvesting was done from Oct. 7-12 and several more days had to stop by noon due to the warm weather, Hopkin said.

“Those are difficult — to be shut down for an entire week is unprecedented, we never had anything like that,” Hopkin said. “Growers wanted to dig, it was frustrating.”

There was no damage done to the beets that remained in the fields, but it was simply too hot for them to be stored outside the ground. The temperature needed to stay below 55 degrees for beets to be stored for longer than a few days. Those temperatures were not reached until the second half of October as highs reached all the way into the 80s for early October.

The Big Horn Basin typically has a winter storm and a hard freeze in October, so farmers were a little anxious over the delay. Any day could have changed from T-shirt weather to snow.

But luck was on their side and that cloud had some silver lining as it gave the unharvested beets more time to grow and increase their sugar content. There were some wet days along the way, but the soil conditions were favorable, Hopkin said.

“Mother nature gives you what she gives you, but it was sure nice in October,” Rodriguez said, noting that the Big Horn Basin had a record-setting year of consecutive frost-free days at 165 days. “It was getting critical towards the end.”

This year’s harvest was nearly two months long, 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.

“It was an extremely long harvest,” Rodriguez said. “We went without a hitch, other than the warm delays.”

Scheduled deliveries went into October instead of switching into long-term storage and that means the factories have to run a bit longer, Rodriguez said.

Now the hope is for the sugar beet piles to store well through the winter as the Lovell plant catches up on processing through the middle of February.

“We need some steadily, evenly, cool weather would be ideal — gradually freeze, then stay frozen,” Rodriguez said. “We don’t like the piles to freeze all the way.”

Last year’s harvest had a quick freeze in early November and then they thawed out a bit, which caused some spoilage. Ideally, the weather needs to gradually cool down so the outside of the beet piles can create a frozen shell around the preserved beets inside.

“I would call it a pleasant harvest, as pleasant as it could be,” Hopkin said.