The beet goes on Pre-pile harvest begins for local sugar beet growers
Limited sugar beet harvesting is set to begin today. Pre-pile harvest is set to begin before the full harvest ramps up in the coming weeks.
“It’s a little bit earlier than normal,” said Arnie Bergen Henengouwen, ASBG president. “Our crop is large and the processor wants to get on with processing so they are done, hopefully, in the first week of February.”
He said overland flooding had an impact on this year’s crop.
“It delayed seeding,” he said. “It took a lot longer to dry the fields enough that producers could get on the land.”
He said there were some pockets more affected than others, but overall the crop turned out better than expected.
“We thought we’d be delayed quite some time,” he said.
About 28,000 acres were contracted this year, and the ASBG predicts about 29 to 30 tonne per acre. Projections are around 840,000 tonnes of beets altogether and, depending on sugar content, could be processed into 130,000 tonnes of sugar.
Bergen-Henengouwen said he does not expect the crop to be as large as last year’s record sugar haul, but slightly lower numbers may be offset somewhat by earlier harvesting.
Expensive environmental improvements required for Taber’s Lantic Sugar, Inc. plant led producers to accept a recent contract which factored in those impacts to the refinery’s bottom line.
“It’s a three-year extension of our current contract, with a couple of adjustments,” Bergen-Henengouwen recently told the Taber Times. “The growers stepped up to the plate — the board felt the need to offer some stability to the industry through this extension.
“The growers did take a bit of a hit, but we felt it was important to get some stability for the industry.”
There are essentially two places sugar beets are grown in Canada — southern Alberta and in Ontario. The Ontario crop is processed in Michigan, however, meaning it is U.S. sugar.
“Sugar beets are grown here, and we refine them, so it is 100 per cent Canadian sugar,” said Melody Garner-Skiba, executive director for Alberta Sugar Beet Growers.
“Nobody else in Canada has that, and I think we need to start to be proud and tout that.”
Any bag of sugar with the laser product marker “22” on it comes from the Taber’s Lantic Sugar, Inc. plant.
The ASBG encourages sugar buyers to check their bags of Roger’s sugar for that product marker to support local producers and local industry. With files from Trevor Busch. Follow @JWSchnarrHerald on Twitter