Rain interrupts sugar beet dig

Posted 10/6/16

Full-scale digging and delivery of sugar beets to Western Sugar Cooperative receiving stations kicked off Sunday, Oct. 2. Only 24 hours later, the sugar company advised growers to suspend deliveries.

On Monday morning, the UW Powell Research and …

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Rain interrupts sugar beet dig

Posted

Only a day into the regular sugar beet harvest on area farms, drenching rain Monday and early Tuesday brought beet-digging operations to a halt.

Full-scale digging and delivery of sugar beets to Western Sugar Cooperative receiving stations kicked off Sunday, Oct. 2. Only 24 hours later, the sugar company advised growers to suspend deliveries.

On Monday morning, the UW Powell Research and Extension Center recorded 0.27 inches of rain. By Tuesday at 8 a.m., the area had received another 0.82 inches.

It was the second heavy rain event in a little over a week.  On Friday and Saturday, Sept. 23-24, moisture of 1 to 1.25 inches had already turned fields muddy.

“If you could get in the fields from the rain before, you dug Sunday (Oct. 2),” said Willwood grower David Northrup. “But it was the only day we were able to go.”

He noted the irony of late fall rain after a summer of hot and dry conditions.

“We irrigated one more time (before digging), figuring ground would be dry. Now, we’re going to be fighting muddy ground,” Northrup said wryly.

Regan Smith, who farms north and east of Powell, concludes that the rain delay will have the effect of stretching out the harvest, probably into November.

“The soil is just saturated,” he said.

“We’ve had two extremely hot and dry harvests in a row, and that stretched things out,” Smith said. “Now we’re going be stretched out for the opposite reason.”

He added, “We’ll do what we can, but it will be a more costly harvest, playing in the mud and getting stuck.”

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