Those growers won't start harvest until Sept. 5 -- one week later than the Aug. 30 start that was announced two weeks ago.

David Berg, Crystal vice president for agriculture, said growers in the district's three western piling stations would start supplying beets to the Drayton and East Grand Forks factories, which will start slicing beets Sept. 7.

Crystal reassessed the impact of the early harvest on growers before a grower meeting in St. Thomas, N.D., last Thursday.

"We just took a hard look at sugar inventories and the need for sugar," Berg said. "And we looked at the real implications it had on these growers. By leaving that quantity of beets in the ground, it will create more tonnage, more sugar."

Growers happy

Robert Green, a grower from St. Thomas who attended the meeting with top company officials, said growers are happy with the change. They had been skeptical about whether a new "prepile incentive" formula, instituted for last year's crop, would fully compensate them for lower sugar that occurs in beets this time of year, Green said.

Berg said growers were concerned about having to harvest beets with less than a 90-day season.

The original reason for starting Aug. 30 was to balance the beet supply with the ability to pile beets. More beets than normal were planted in that area because of an "acre shift" program instituted last spring. Beet acres were shifted from areas too wet to plant into those that were drier.

The rest of the prepile harvest will start Sept. 10, Berg said. Crystal continues to project a healthy 19- to 19.5-ton-per-acre beet yield valleywide. Production is expected to range from 18 tons in some districts to about 20 tons in others.

"The best beets appear to be in the Crookston area, although some of them up there have been pretty heavily affected by rain and hail in the past few weeks," Berg said.

PIK program?

There's still no word on whether the U.S. Department of Agriculture will implement the so-called "payment-in-kind" program on this year's beets. Such a program requires growers to destroy healthy, growing beets in exchange for receiving certificates that are redeemed for sugar in government-owned inventories. The purpose is to reduce a surplus of stored sugar that is holding the price of sugar at near 20-year lows. Berg said a "PIK" program is the "right thing to do for the market" but said the delay in an announcement is not encouraging.

"I'm not too optimistic about it at this point," Berg said, adding that it's "getting awfully late for successful implementation." He said Crystal had been lobbying for it since spring, which "would have been the right time to implement it, before all of the costs are incurred, before the crop is grown."

He said even if the PIK program were announced immediately it isn't clear whether growers would be able to get paperwork to the co-op, to the USDA and back to the producer in time.

Berg said he has been told the issue has "been taken to the very highest levels at USDA."

Mark Weber, executive director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, said industry sources in Washington tell him the issue is on "the secretary's desk" for a decision, which could come by the end of the week.

Pates reports on agriculture. Reach him at (701) 297-6869 or mikkel@corpcomm.net.