Hi! My name is Laura Rutherford and I’m a wife, mother, marathon runner and ninth generation farmer.
I live and farm with my husband and three young sons in the Red River Valley region of eastern North Dakota, where we grow sugarbeets, dry beans and wheat. I grew up on a small farm/ranch operation in South Dakota, and met my farmer husband while attending college in North Dakota. We are two of the only 10,000 American family farmers who grow over one million acres of sugarbeets in California, North Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming. One of the most frequent questions I’m asked on social media or when I travel is, “What is a sugarbeet?” I love talking about my crop, so here is my top five list of things to know about sugarbeets.
1) Sugarbeets are a Root Crop, and Their Tissue is White (Not Red!)
Sugarbeets are a root crop, and flourish in temperate climates where the growing season is about five months long. A mature sugarbeet is about one foot long, weighs 2 to 5 pounds, and contains about 18 percent sucrose, which is concentrated in its taproot. Sucrose is a carbohydrate that occurs naturally in fruits, vegetables, and other agricultural crops, but occurs at greater levels in sugar beets and sugarcane.
Sugar was first isolated from beet roots in 1747 by Andreas Marggraf, in what is now Poland. The sugarbeet then journeyed to France when Napoleon ordered that 69,000 acres be devoted to growing the new crop. Sugarbeet production in North America began in 1879 at a farm in Alvarado, Calif. Today in the United States about 57 percent of domestically produced sugar comes from sugarbeets.
Visit medium.com for the complete list.