Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, October 13, 2021
The sugar beet harvest so far shows the crop survived summer’s high heat.
Brodie Griffin, agriculture director at Boise-based Amalgamated Sugar, said that as of Oct. 10, accumulative sugar content stands at 17.72%, nearly four tenths of 1 percentage point above the year-to-date average.
The figure trails the 2020 crop by twelve one hundredths of 1 percentage point. The full-year record was 18.48%, set in 2018.
Amalgamated has about 700 members in Idaho, Oregon and Washington. They grew about 181,000 acres of sugar beets this year, up from just over 177,000 in 2020.
“Due to over an inch of rain and snow flurries, harvest progress in the Magic Valley and Upper Snake is slow, and will take some time and patience before we get back to normal” following the week of Oct. 10, Griffin said. Given a much better forecast for the Oct. 16-17 weekend, he expected harvest operations to “normalize.”
He said harvest is progressing well in the Treasure Valley of southwest Idaho, which received a little rain over the Oct. 9-10 weekend. The area had low temperatures, “which allow us to pile the beets into long-term storage at favorable pulp temperatures.”
Tonnage per acre is averaging about 40.5 companywide, slightly above the long-term average and just below the 2020 crop.
“At this point, we are seeing stable tonnage and excellent sugar content in the beets,” Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Association Executive Director Brad Griff said Oct. 8. Farmers are on track for a good crop as harvest continues through October, barring a hard frost or rain.
“We were not sure how sugar beets would respond to the record heat we had this summer, but it appears sugar beets have withstood the heat very well and have been able to put on a good amount of size and produce sugar content,” he said.
Beets so far are “may be one of the bright spots in terms of a crop that yielded well this year in the face of high temperatures,” Griff said. “We hope that farmers can at least supplement or offset some of the other crops that didn’t do as well because of the drought and heat.”
Southern Idaho farmers irrigated sugar beets and other crops more than normal, he said.
Ryan Samples, who farms south of Burley in the eastern Magic Valley, said Oct. 8 that his sugar beets appear to have withstood the prolonged high heat better than some of his other crops.
Some beet fields in the area produced well and many stayed around average, he said.
“June and July were pretty tough with all the heat that we had,” Samples said.
He and other members of a local irrigation district had sufficient water after agreeing to irrigate every eight days instead of every six.
Also in the heat, “we had a few more weeds,” Samples said.
In southwest Idaho, Gabe Flick said his recently completed sugar beet harvest “was mostly good, and I thought the sugars were decent considering the heat.”
Neighboring farms rotated irrigation water to make sure they had enough.
The farm this year moved north, from Sand Hollow to the Weiser area, where the soil contains more clay and “holds water much longer than I am used to,” he said.
Flick said he saw some Rhizoctonia fungus after “I may have overwatered,” though some neighbors also had it.
“It was a challenging year to try to manage water with as much heat as we had,” he said.
