'We've had a trade war with China since then, and we've had a pandemic.' Supply chain was very different back then,' Johansson said. But farmers across commodities, including sugar beet farmers, say the bill needs to be modernized before expiration next September. In November, Congress agreed to a one-year extension of the bill. The domestic sugar policy - benefiting both beet farmers in the north and sugarcane farmers in the south - is built into the Farm Bill, which was last revised in 2018, said Robert Johansson, director of economics and policy analysis for the American Sugar Alliance, which represents producers. Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative, headquartered in Wahpeton, N.D., also finished their season with strong numbers, notching yield just shy of 30 tons an acre, for a total harvest of 2.85 million tons.Ī lingering uncertainty remains, however, for how the negotiations over the massive federal Farm Bill, an omnibus that authorizes crop insurance to a loan program for domestic producers, will shake out for sugar beet growers. Todd Geselius, vice president of agriculture for the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative, reported that their farmers had the second-best harvest by-volume in their history, harvesting 3.94 million tons. But there's a swath of farmers in and around Renville County - located midway between Minneapolis and the South Dakota border - who also farm the sucrose-laden hardy root vegetable. Minnesota's beet farmers are concentrated in the Red River Valley. Factories owned by three cooperatives run from early fall through the end of spring. During the fall in western Minnesota, stretching up to the Canadian border, it's common to see beets piled along roads. Minnesota growers are the most productive in the nation, producing roughly a third of the nation's overall crop of beets.

'The beets were disease-free,' Weber said.

Weber attributed seed genetics to the increasing productivity. When farmers went back into the fields in October, they reaped blockbuster yields. 'We were getting reports in the Valley that were kind of hit-and-miss.'īut this fall, particularly in late August and September, the rain arrived. 'You tell me what happened,' Harrison Weber, executive director with the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, said. Not only were the beets big, but they also were loaded with sugar, which gets used for sweetener in soft drinks to candy bars to baked goods. Minnesota's sugar beet farmers beat the odds this fall with American Crystal Sugar farmers piling up a record 12.7 million tons of beets in a growing season cycling between wet and dry spells.

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