The fate of the 2019 area sugar beet crop lies beneath the frozen ground.

With about a third of the sugar beet acreage still to be dug, arctic air plunged temperatures into the single digits Monday night and halted harvesting operations. It’s the second stop this month in Western Sugar Cooperative’s Lovell Factory District.   The mercury fell to 5 degrees Monday night and threatened to go even lower on Tuesday night.

The ground is frozen; the key is how far into the ground the freeze has reached, said Ric Rodriguez, Heart Mountain grower and co-op board member.

“All we can do now is hope that we can harvest again when it starts warming up,” he said. “We’ll take a long look at it and see what happens. It’s a day by day, week by week thing.”

Rodriguez said Western Sugar is not yet calling any beets in the ground a total loss.

At this time, “It’s our full intention to get the beets out,” he said.

However, “there’s a chance the freeze will get down too deep and the beets will get mushy,” he cautioned. “It’s got to be a beet that’s going to process.”

The Lovell factory has handled frozen beets well since the end of the first week in October. Frozen beets are piled separately for direct hauling to the factory.

Area receiving stations worked overtime last week to take in as many sugar beets as possible. The plan was to get up to 40 days of frozen beets piled to stay ahead of the factory through the extremely cold weather of this week, Rodriguez said.

“We didn’t quite get that,” he said. “Some guys couldn’t get their quotas in because of wet fields. It’s been really wet in the Burlington area.”