Most of the beets have healed up, but the frost took some tonnage away and kept the sugar from increasing.”

Rodney Perry, Western Sugar

Sugar beet growers in northwest Wyoming not only produced a crop with the highest percentage sugar content in the history of the Lovell Factory District, but the sugar in their 2018 beets topped the charts for the Western Sugar Cooperative’s entire four-state region.

This district’s average sugar content of slightly over 18 percent is the only growing area in the cooperative’s four states that will reach 18 percent sugar, said Rodney Perry, Western Sugar’s chief executive officer at Denver.

As of Oct. 26, Perry said the co-op is predicting a yield of 29 tons per acre and sugar content of slightly over 18 percent in Wyoming. The comparable figures for the Montana sugar crop are a little over 30 tons per acre and slightly more than 17 percent sugar.

Perry said the harvest is not nearly as far along in Colorado and Nebraska. He said Colorado is running sugars in the high 16s, and Nebraska is close to 17. Yields in those two states are probably going to be somewhere between 30 and 31 tons to the acre.

Overall tonnage across four states looks like it’s going to be down a little, “due to weather,” Perry said. The cooperative had been expecting a harvest of 3.7 million tons, but that projection has been adjusted as the harvest progresses.

“We’re going to be closer to 3.5 million tons, down about 200,000 tons from what we had seen earlier in the year in our sampling,” he said.

Cool, wet weather early in the season in some areas and freezing temperatures in some places during harvest accounted for the lower yields.

“The frost damage pretty much stopped the beets from growing or putting on more sugar,” Perry said.

Snow cover along the Front Range in Colorado did help protect the beets, and good weather followed the frost.

“Most of the beets have healed up, but the frost took some tonnage away and kept the sugar from increasing,”  Perry said. “We will be able to harvest and process all beets.”

The selling price of sugar provides some good news to growers and company at harvest time.

“Price for this crop is better this year, really better than in the last three years,” Perry said. “The bulk sugar price is up probably $3 to $4 per hundredweight, which is needed.”

The Western Sugar CEO said he is pleased with a new sugar marketing relationship with Mexico that will carry forward into future years.

Factory performance in processing the co-op’s beets is also much better than last year, Perry said, after a year in which factory problems slowed down processing and hurt the bottom line.

“We’re back on track,” Perry said, after capital spending at factories across the region.

“Overall, Lovell (the factory) has performed well, and extraction of sugar has gone well,” he said.

The end is in sight for the local beet harvest: Mark Bjornestad, senior agriculturist for Western Sugar, said 98 percent of the Lovell Factory District sugar beets had been delivered going into the last week of October.

“There are three growers delivering to the Lovell factory yard, and we are down to one harvesting group comprised of two growers at the Emblem station,” he said. “It is estimated we will finish the Emblem station by Wednesday, and the factory station should be complete by Friday.”