Glen Reed finished piling his 330-acre sugarbeet crop more than a month early, thanks to the warm dry conditions of the 2014 harvest season on his farm 5 miles northeast of Cody, Wyo.
Reed, Lovell district president of the Bighorn Basin Beet Growers Association, said his crop totaled 31.7 tons per acre with a slightly lower than average sugar content of 17 percent in the area. Reed suffered mildly from a short span of freezing temperatures early in the growing season.
“We had an early freeze and 4 to 6 inches of snow at our farm,” he said. “That pretty much stopped the beet growth. They didn’t put on more tonnage after that.”
Sugarbeet plants often suffer from the death of their leaves in temperatures nearing 20 degrees. The plants divert precious sugar content from the growth of the beet to regenerate the plant’s leaves.
Randall Jobman, agricultural manager of Western Sugar Cooperative’s Lovell factory, said the northern Wyoming crop had an overall improvement in sugar content levels over last year.
The Lovell factory reported an average yield of 26.5 tons per acre and a sugar content of 17.4 percent.
He said this year’s crop exhibited an 18.6 percent increase in sugar content.
“It was a good harvest, other than it was awfully warm,” he said.
The abnormally warm autumn weather led Lovell factory officials to suspend harvest to the early morning hours to avoid storing beets at temperatures warmer than 50 degrees.
Although the early freeze did affect sugar beet yields in the region, he said the region’s sugar content remained higher than the 2013 season.
“It limited the late growth potential for tonnage,” he said. “With that freeze, on average, a beet will grow less in that September and October time frame than it would have normally.”
Wyoming Sugar Company in Worland reported near record crops.
The region’s harvest yielded 30 tons per acre and an 18.32 percent sugar content.
Myron Casdorph, agriculture administrator at Wyoming Sugar Co., said farmers in the region avoided the hard freezes suffered by northern Wyoming sugar beet producers.
“We never had a really bad freeze,” Casdorph said. “The only thing that could have been better was it could have been cooler. We had to slow down harvest to avoid putting them in the piles too warm.”
He said the region’s warm and dry fall harvest conditions were the exact opposite of last year.
“We could handle a little cold weather now,” he said. “Right now, it’s kind of dry. We’re to the point now that we could use some moisture for next year.”
With the 2014 harvest in the pile, Reed is looking to next year’s conditions.
“It’s good that we had good conditions to get the crops out, but at the same time, we could use some fall moisture,” he said. “That’s the downside of the dryer harvest conditions, but you can’t have it all.”
Source: www.trib.com