Favorable harvest conditions didn’t help sugarbeet growers in the Red River Valley overcome a cold, wet spring.
Dan Gowan, American Crystal Sugar's director of agriculture, said per-acre tonnage for Crystal growers finished close to 24 tons, and sugar content settled around 17.5 percent.
It’s a situation that has become all too familiar for Jeff Whelan, who grows about 700 acres of sugarbeets on his farm near Crystal, N.D. The harvest was good, but the crop was a little disappointing in yield.
“We can attribute this little downtick in yield to being too wet in the spring up and down the Red River Valley,” said Jeff, 56, who operates J.J. Whelan & Sons with his brother, Doug, 52. Jeff is in charge of the beets and dry edible beans, while Doug oversees the potatoes and small grains.
Wet weather
“Mother Nature has been overabundant with her rainfall for five years or more,” Jeff said. “We’ve been struggling in our little part of the world with excess moisture for a number of years. Typically it’s the late spring and early summer thunderstorms that can drop anywhere from 3 to 5 inches in a short time. This year we were extremely wet. We got the crop planted late. We planted into the first part of June.
“It was a similar scenario for 2013,” Jeff said. “We did come up with some pretty good tonnage for the 2013 crop. We weren’t lucky enough to catch that perfect growing weather this year.”
This translates into reduced yields in both tonnage and sugar. Harvest wrapped up Oct. 12. The Whelans deliver beets to the St. Thomas piling site. The average haul to the piling site is eight miles. From there American Crystal may transport beets to N.D. factories in Drayton or Hillsboro or to the factory in East Grand Forks, Minn.
“It would be nice to have a good price and a good yield,” Jeff said. “You know that’s what every grower wants, but you don’t always get that. And that’s the nature of the business. There are ups and downs. There are highs and lows.
“But our newer varieties are somewhat more forgiving than what we had in the old days,” Jeff said. “I had a field of beets right across from my home that was under water four separate times in the one corner. And the beets were still green at harvest time. There wasn’t much there, but they were still living.”
Too much moisture also carries over in the soil. Before the current wet cycle began, soil types were light enough that an inch of rain would keep Jeff out of the field for only a day.
“Now a quarter inch would cause us an interruption,” Jeff said. “Our soil profile has been pretty full these last few years.”
Fortunately Jeff views the weather patterns as cyclical.
“Our dry sugarbeet harvest may be a preview of a little drier season,” he said. “Typically if we don’t get a lot of rain during beet harvest, we’re thinking drought. I’m not thinking that extreme. But we could use a little drier cycle in this area.
“We are all dryland here,” he said. “We don’t have any irrigation. It kind of depends on how extreme the moisture is. It’s the thunderstorms that drop a lot of rain quickly that are really devastating. We kind of got caught in our rotation. Our beets were in some locations that were a little more vulnerable to an excess of water.”
Now Jeff must wait and see what spring brings him.
“Our ground is all frozen now,” he said. “We’ve frozen up relatively dry. I’m not concerned about the dryness. But in past years we’ve frozen up with saturated soils. So I’m cautiously optimistic that the weather cycle will turn here, and we’ll have what we think as more normal weather.
“We would hope to be in the field by mid-April planting some sugarbeets,” Jeff said. “That certainly would be nice to get back to that more normal planting date. I’d surely welcome weather conditions that would allow us to get in by the end of April and get growing.”
Early employment
Jeff began growing beets while in high school.
“There was a notice in the local newspaper about American Crystal stock for sale,” he said.
His dad, George, agreed it would be a good venture.
“I’ve had my own sugarbeet contract since 1975,” Jeff said. “I purchased some American Crystal shares from one of my neighbor’s estates. I bought my stock when I was a sophomore and harvested my first crop when I was a junior and have been going ever since for about 40 years.”
Jeff is a fifth-generation grower and graduate of North Dakota State University with a degree in agricultural economics.
“My dad is a real inspiration to both my brother and me,” he said. “His work ethic is great. My dad is in his early 80s and still going strong. He does what he wants to, and he certainly helps us out a lot. But he kind of passed the day to day operations over to Doug and myself.”
Jeff and Doug farm land in Lodema Township of Pembina County. They are third-generation sugarbeet growers.
The operation is named after Jeff’s grandfather, Joe, who went by the name J.J. and started growing sugarbeets around 1950.
Family first
Jeff and his wife, Greta, have two grown daughters, Anna and Kate.
Anna and her husband, Erik Sjursen, welcomed the first grandchild, Nadia, into the family on Oct. 9.
“A little sugarbeet harvest baby,” Jeff said. “They live in Bismarck, N.D., about five hours away from us. We don’t get to see them as often as we’d like to of course. Since the baby has been born they have been up to visit us a couple times. That’s pretty exciting for us.”
Kate graduated from NDSU in 2013 and is pursuing a career as a physician’s assistant.
Greta hails from Crookston, N.D., less then 100 miles from where she now resides.
“She grew up in town and didn’t really have a lot of exposure to farming prior to me coming into her life,” Jeff said. “We’ve been married 29 years.”
A fine print by artist Mary Engelbreit that sits on Greta’s desk proclaims “Bloom Where You’re Planted.”
“She definitely has bloomed here on the farm,” Jeff said. “I think she’s a great asset not only to our farm, but she represents growers very well too at growers meetings.”
Disease management
Root rot diseases have been more prevalent under recent wet conditions but isn’t a huge problem.
“You see it in those spots of the field that were excessively wet,” he said. “And that’s not really a great area fortunately. I pick our varieties with an eye on some pretty good disease packages. I just don’t want to get into a situation where we’re battling that disease.
“Weed resistance is always on my mind,” he said. “I’m worried about resistance, especially kochia. That seems to be the one in our area that is the most far along as far as building resistance. In our rotation the sugarbeets are the only Roundup Ready crop, so we’re using other cultural methods and herbicides in other rotational crops. That’s a great benefit to reducing weed resistance.
“Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to be enough,” Jeff said. “We’re going to see resistance sooner or later. But I’m hoping that if everybody is vigilant we can put it off somewhat. It’s inevitable that we’re going to have some issues with resistance. And then I suppose we’ll going to have to look at some tank mixes with our Roundup to get those unless there’s a new technology. I haven’t heard of anything real close to being released.
“These weeds can mutate so fast,” Jeff said. “You see a few odd survivors in a field and then in a year or two you have way too large of a population. But I have my fingers crossed. So far our sugarbeet fields have been nice and clean. I haven’t seen escapes. But I’m worried about it.”
Termed out
Jeff’s granddad was very active in the sugarbeet growers association in his day. A glance at photos from that era proves it.
“There was a picture of my grandpa with a bunch of growers from the valley in Washington, D.C.,” Jeff said. “I can certainly relate to that, because I’ve been maybe in that same spot where that photo was taken with my fellow growers and we’re still working for the same objective two generations later. The political side of growing sugarbeets is something you always have to be up on, because in my mind it’s our most challenging aspect of it.”
Jeff was elected to the Drayton factory growers board from the St. Thomas piling site. Now he’s ceding his spot to someone else after hitting his 12-year limit last December.
“It’s a real grassroots organization,” Jeff said. “I’m involved in many other growers associations, but it all goes back to my local board—the Drayton factory board.”
He also serves on the executive committee of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers and on the American Sugarbeet Growers Association Board, as well as the executive committee of the World Association of Beet and Cane Growers.
“I’m going from a fairly high level of involvement to being retired from all my boards throughout this winter season,” Jeff said. “I will retire from the ASGA board at the annual meeting in February.
“It’s been an honor and a privilege for me to serve on these boards. I’ve been really fortunate to be involved. There are no better people than sugarbeet people—rather it’s your local, your neighbors or if it’s on a national level or even an international level. We get together at an international meeting for the world growers and it’s just like being back home talking to your neighbors. We have the same concerns basically if we’re in the Red River Valley or Germany or England or wherever to some extent.
“The political situation is vastly different for each of us. But when it comes down to the production part of growing sugarbeets there is kind of a kinship there that is kind of unique. It’s fun to interact with other sugarbeet growers.”