AMERICAN FALLS, Idaho—Amalgamated Sugar Co. plans to commence with early harvest on Sept. 8 and open its factories two days later, in anticipation of a crop officials are optimistic will set a fifth consecutive yield record.
Though Amalgamated leaders are elated about the prospects of another bumper crop, they say their growers are now producing as much volume as company facilities can handle. So they’re shifting focus toward finding varieties that produce more sugar per ton.
“We have hit the threshold of yield with our processing capacity, so to get more sugar, we’ve got to focus on getting more sugar in the beets,” explained Cody Bingham, a Jerome farmer who chairs the Seed and Research Alliance, a committee of growers that makes variety approval decisions.
Amalgamated, which averaged a respectable 17.25 percent sugar last season following a down year in 2013, has set a goal of consistently reaching 18 percent sugar by 2020 with all of its commercial varieties.
Amalgamated growers must all agree to plant only varieties approved for their areas by the committee, based on yield and sugar content data derived from variety trial plots in American Falls, Declo, Burley, Rupert, Paul, Jerome, Nampa and Ontario, Ore.
Paul Foote, Amalgamated’s senior agricultural research technician, explained a unique challenge in Amalgamated’s growing area is finding varieties that resist the devastating curly top virus. Amalgamated has started staffing its own nurseries to supplement curly top resistance data and aid in the committee’s selections—expanding its Nampa curly top nursery and adding a Paul nursery this season.
In Eastern Idaho, where curly top is less prevalent, Amalgamated is in the fourth year of a program allowing growers to plant roughly a third of their acreage in any of four Midwestern varieties that don’t meet the company’s curly top-resistance parameters but are known to produce high sugar levels.
“It’s the answer for more sugar for us,” said American Falls farmer Lamar Isaak, who planted the maximum acreage allowed of out-of-area varieties. “We averaged 17.8 percent sugar last year, and usually we’re in the 16s.”
The trade-off for Isaak was a slight yield reduction, though the increased sugar more than offset the difference.
Wade Povey, whose farm hosts the American Falls variety trials, has also experienced a slight yield reduction with out-of-area varieties, but has been impressed by the high sugars, especially at early harvest.
By 2017, Foote said high-sugar varieties with adequate curly top resistance should be approved.
For this season, Amalgamated has also revised its selection program, basing the benchmark for new varieties on averages of four stable-producing varieties rather than the mean performance of all varieties approved for a growing area. Amalgamated’s former program, which required a year each of experimental trials and trials on a test-market basis prior to full approval, has also been adjusted to include a second year of experimental evaluation.
Mark Schmidt, with Betaseed, believes the changes will provide his company more consistent benchmark data and help with planning seed increases of proven varieties.
Source: www.capitalpress.com