Beet Farmers Expect Small Harvest
September 20, 2005
By Jeff Zent, The Forum

For many of the region’s farmers, torrential summer rains took the fun out of this year’s sugar beet harvest.

About the only bright spot is recent price increases for refined sugar.

In the Red River Valley, excessive rainfall was blamed for destroying at least 28,000 acres of beets, spreading disease and reducing the region’s once-promising crop to one that’s below average, farmers and industry officials said Monday.

“It’s more what I feared than what I hoped for,” Clay County farmer Mark Nyquist said.

About half of Nyquist’s beets were pounded by 11 inches of rain in June and July. Those crops haven’t fully recovered, he said.

“The beets went into survival mode instead of growth mode,” Nyquist said.

Moorhead-based American Crystal Sugar, a cooperative of about 3,000 shareholder-farmers, planted 500,000 acres of beets, but lost at least 20,000 acres to flooding, spokesman Jeff Schweitzer said.

Farmers in the northern counties of Pembina in North Dakota and Kittson in Minnesota were the hardest hit, he said.

American Crystal’s 2005 beet crop will yield less - possibly 2 tons per acre lighter - than the co-op’s five-year average, Schweitzer said.

Members of the Wahpeton, N.D.-based Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative lost 8,000 acres of beets and that figure could grow during harvest, said Tom Knudsen, the co-op’s vice president of agriculture.

Minn-Dak’s 500 shareholders planted about 100,000 acres of beets. The co-op’s members typically harvest about 2 million tons of beets, but this year’s crop will likely weigh in at about 1.5 million, Knudsen said.

Schweitzer and Knudsen said it’s too early to know the sugar content of this year’s crops.

Along with yield losses, farmers are contending with root rot, leaf spot and other diseases, said Alan Dexter, a plant scientist at North Dakota State University.

“It’s been a tough year and some of our yields will reflect that,” he said.

American Crystal growers began what they call their “pre-pile” harvest last week. They’re harvesting just enough beets to sustain the start-up of the co-ops’ five regional factories and to keep a few days’ supply on hand.

The co-op’s full harvest, when beets are pulled from the ground and trucked to piling stations around the clock, is set to begin Oct. 1.

Minn-Dak growers plan to begin harvesting on Sept. 28, Knutsen said.

All of the region’s sugar beet news isn’t bad, though.

In the United States, refined sugar is selling for about 27 cents a pound, about a 3-cent increase since January.

Some of the price increase comes at the expense of sugar cane farmers along the Gulf Coast, said Jack Roney, director of economics and policy analysis at the American Sugar Alliance in Arlington, Va.

Hurricane Katrina damaged two sugar mills in Louisiana and destroyed cane crops that would have produced at least 120,000 tons of sugar, ASA spokesman Phillip Hayes said.

Rising consumption, crop losses in the Gulf Coast, and a small crop in the Red River Valley are working to tighten sugar supplies and strengthen the domestic market, Roney said.

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