Montana Growers Race Weather to End of Beet Harvest

Harvest had to stop to accommodate nearly two weeks of bad October weather. On the Billings end of Montana’s sugar belt, more than 30 percent of the beets still needed to be uprooted as warm, drying winds arrived late in the week. The race to harvest before the snow returned was in full sprint.

“We're at 66 percent harvested, 67 percent, somewhere in there, with a higher percentage on the east end of the district compared to the west end,” said Kim Nile, a Western Sugar Cooperative farmer near Forsyth.

Sugarbeet farming is a $100 million industry along the Yellowstone River and its lower tributaries from Fromberg to Sidney.

There was still snow on ground at midweek when Nile spoke. He estimated that no farmer had turned a wheel in weeks, which is to say beet diggers and carts remained idle through the crappy weather. There wasn’t much concern about deep freeze damage, about whether beets sliced for sugar making the Billings factory would weep white, or the juice would run clear as frozen beets do.

The crop was looking pretty good early in the harvest. Randall Jobman, Western’s vice president of agriculture, northern region, said in September the cooperative's yield in Montana was expected to average 34.9 tons per acre, and predicted the crop in the Lovell, Wyo., area to average about 28.7 tons. Jobman put the sugar content at less than 18 percent.

“Oh man, they’re just amazing. They’re 19 and 20 percent. I’m serious. All you had to do was cut them open and the sugar fell out,” Nile said, laughing.

That’s a farmers’ boast. The reality is, processing beet sugar involves removing the sugar from a plant that’s mostly water.

In sugar factory towns like Billings and Sidney, there’s an endless cloud of steam and carbon from factory stacks and a trace of unpleasant order that’s not unlike sour baby formula. Outside the factories there are evaporating ponds of processed beet water. There are mounds of sugar beets in the lot, trucked in from piles strategically located outside of farm communities. It’s a balancing act, timing the pace of the harvest with the factory’s appetite for beets. The risk of getting the pace wrong is having harvested beets spoil in the piles while waiting to be trucked to the factory.

In far Eastern Montana, the sugar beet harvest wrapped up just as the first of the early winter bite sunk in. Don Steinbeisser Jr. said his beets were the last in the region to come out of the ground for Sidney Sugars, which runs a factory in Sidney just on the Montana side of the border with North Dakota.

It was good to have everyone's beets out of the ground this October after the brutally wet harvest of the 2019, when the Sidney area was clobbered with a foot of rain in September. The final weeks were still challenging, Steinbeisser said.

Before that blast of weather, the ground had been dry and hard, Steinbeisser said. When the moisture hit, followed by the leaf-killing cold, what resulted was hard, dry ground with “an inch and a half of snotty tops and snow mixed on top.” Sugar beets are one of the last Montana crops to come out of the ground.

“It was really fun,” Steinbeisser said, facetiously. “Funner than last year when we left them in the ground.” In 2019 the farmers in far Eastern Montana hauled their muddy, frozen beets to the pile one week, only to haul the worst ones back to the farm in the weeks that followed because the beets were too far gone for sugar making.

“The sugar is going be around 19%. It’s actually higher than we normally have it,” Steinbeisser said of this year’s crop. I’m not sure about the tonnage yet, I’ve been waiting for a report, but I think between 28 and 29 is going to be close.”