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Sugar beet growers in the Red River Valley eased into a harvest
season Wednesday as if they were swimmers testing cool water with
their toes.
American Crystal Sugar's 2,500 beet growers will harvest about 10
percent of this year's crop by the end of September, Public
Relations Manager Jeff Schweitzer said.
Members of the Wahpeton-based Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative will
begin their pre-pile harvest Tuesday, said Patricia Keough-Wilson,
the co-op's communications director.
In October, growers from both cooperatives will step up their
harvest and transport beets not only to processing plants, but to
regional piling stations.
Crystal officials project their growers will harvest a crop
yielding an average of 20 tons per acre, about equal to last year's
production level, Schweitzer said.
American Crystal's 3,000 shareholders planted 500,000 acres this
year. But crop failures and a federal payment-in-kind program that
will pay growers to destroy some of this year's beets will likely
reduce the harvest to about 445,000 acres, company officials said.
Root rot disease and excessive moisture destroyed about 25,000
acres of sugar beets, Schweitzer said.
"There were just a lot of acres that didn't survive the
heavy rains in the early part of the summer," he said.
A federal payment-in-kind program will likely eliminate another
30,000 acres, said David Berg, Crystal's vice president of
administration.
Growers for the Wahpeton-based Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative
planted about 106,000 acres, Wilson said.
Root rot disease and other production problems destroyed about
2,000 acres of the co-op's sugar beets and the federal
payment-in-kind program could eliminate as much as 10,000 more
acres, she said.
Minn-Dak estimates that its growers will also yield 20 tons of
sugar beets per acre. Last year the growers harvested 21.5 tons per
acre, she said.
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