In south-central Montana, the last Saturday in October is all about the sugar, and not just because of Halloween. The last of the region’s beet crop is coming out of the ground.
“We’re 90 percent finished with the harvest in Billings this morning, and 96 percent complete in Lovell,” said Randall Jobman, Western Sugar Cooperative’s agricultural manager. “Beet quality is excellent this year.”
As trundling beet diggers uprooted the last of the 2015 crop, harvest was looking Peep sweet, with sugar content at 18.2 percent and roughly 32.8 tons per acre on Montana farms feeding beets to the Billings sugar factory.
Wyoming farms delivering beets to Lovell were averaging 28.9 tons per acres and 17.9 percent sugar.
Western expects to have enough beets on hand to make sugar into mid-February. The stop date would be close to average, although the factory got a head start this year, firing up Sept. 2.
Statewide, the sugarbeet crop is one of the better success stories of 2015 Montana agriculture, said Eric Sommer, of the National Agricultural Statistics Service in Helena.
Eastern Montana growers harvested a million tons of sugarbeets for the Sidney Sugars factory in Sidney. The harvest broke the record set last year by 200,000 tons. Good weather trends kept blowing favorably for the farmers in the east.
“Sugarbeets did really well,” Sommer said. “The warm June weather helped growth.”
Northwest Farm Credit Services, in its 2015 beet report, forecast beet sugar prices above 30 cents a pound, as abundant world sugar supplies continue to drag prices. However, values were still among the highest in the past three years, a sign that sugar companies faced with low prices won’t be defaulting on government loans and paying their debts in forfeited sugar.
Returns in Idaho and Montana are expected to be above $40 per ton, above the amount farmers need to break even, Northwest reported.
Beet sugar production in 2015 is forecast to be the second highest on record, despite a paring back in planted acres.
Source: www.billingsgazette.com