Shareholders in Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative earned a record $102 million in gross revenue from last year’s crop, President and CEO David Roche said Tuesday.

“At $102 million we’ve really set a new standard at Minn-Dak,” Roche said during a news conference held in conjunction with the co-op’s 32nd annual business meeting.

Growers took home a gross payment of about $45 per ton of beets, he said. Minn-Dak’s 2004 sugar beet crop is lighter, contains less sugar and will earn its shareholders less, Roche said.

The cooperative’s 448 shareholders are expected to be paid about $36 per ton of beets for this year’s crop, he said.

Excessive rains, primarily during spring planting and harvesting, lowered the sugar content in this year’s beets. Soggy fields also kept growers from harvesting about 5,000 acres, he said.

The 2004 crop is one of many challenges facing Minn-Dak, Roche said. The cooperative’s producers are surviving flat refined sugar prices by continuously increasing their efficiencies, he said.

The growers have lowered their production costs by about 20 percent since 1980, while increasing their sugar yield per acre by 35 percent, Roche said.

Vic Krabbenhoft, a Clay County farmer who has served on Minn-Dak’s board of directors for 15 years, said he’s never seen the industry face more challenges.

“The string is getting tighter around our neck all the time,” said Krabbenhoft, the board’s chairman.

Krabbenhoft, facing term limits, stepped down Tuesday, as did director Edward Moen of Colfax, N.D.

Shareholders elected Dennis Butenhoff, Baker, Minn., and Dennis Klosterman, Morten, N.D., to fill the nine-member board’s two vacant seats.

The board is expected to pick a chairman today.

Roche said Minn-Dak will continue fighting against passage of trade agreements that call for greater imports of subsidized foreign sugar.

Minn-Dak and other sugar companies also are embarking on a national promotion campaign in hopes of reversing the sweeteners’ declining consumption, said Andrew Briscoe, president and CEO of the Washington-based Sugar Association.

TV and print ads will distance low-calorie sugar from unnatural sweeteners, Briscoe said.

Minn-Dak will contribute about $1 million to the promotion campaign during the next three years, Roche said.

Some of the ads currently under development will roll out in test markets next spring, Briscoe said.

The sugar industry has taken a “nine-year sabbatical” from a national promotion campaign, Briscoe said.

The promotions work, he said.

Sugar consumption increased 19 percent during the industry’s last national campaign from 1986 to 1995, he said.

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