With the onset of a severe freeze this week, Lovell area sugar beet farmers are finished harvesting after a season with great promise and even bigger disappointment.
The decision to officially end the beet harvest was made Friday during a conference call between the Western Sugar agricultural department and the Northwest Wyoming Growers Association, according to Lovell WS factory manager Phil Hackman. He said the decision was made based on falling sugar concentrations in beets that are still in the ground, as well as an unfavorable weather forecast.
This year’s crop was expected to be a record harvest in the Lovell area, according to forecasts by the United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service. The harvest began early this year because of the expected bumper crop, but now it is being cut short with about 30 percent still in the ground.
Western Sugar sent letters from Denver to growers to notify them that beets were no longer being accepted for processing at the Lovell factory, Hackman said. Insurance companies also require the letter for growers to make a claim on lost crops.
The freeze hasn’t been good for farmers and the effects of the lost crops will ripple throughout many communities in the area that rely on beet farming.
“It’s not good for the factory, the factory workers, or the community as a whole,” Hackman said. 
The Lovell factory is estimated to shut down Dec. 29-30, Hackman said, based on a count taken Dec. 4 that determined the factory had about 26 days worth of beets left in piles outside the facility. That number could change depending on the condition of some of the beets, Hackman said.
At the beginning of the harvest, the factory was expected to continue to process beets until about Feb. 10, 2010. The previous factory campaign ended on Feb. 18, 2009, Hackman said.
Following a severe cold snap in October, growers had been delivering beets to the Lovell factory on a quota system that allotted them to harvest and deliver a percentage of their crop in weekly increments. The allotments were designed to allow the factory to process the beets immediately after they were brought in because the cold-damaged beets wouldn’t store well.
During the past several weeks, growers enjoyed some favorable weather that allowed the harvest to continue into late November, despite forecasts of frigid temperatures that never materialized. But while those few weeks of decent temperatures left the window open for more harvesting, they also impacted the piles of beets that had been stacked before the October cold snap. Freezing and thawing and winds pushing warm air into the piles caused some of them to leak water from degrading beets.
Because of the pile storage problems, quotas were suspended in late November so that the factory could begin to process some of the beets that were beginning to degrade in the piles, Hackman said.
The pile storage issues were taken care of by mid-week last week, Hackman said, but by that time the cold was rolling in and the decision was later made at the conference call to stop accepting beets at the Lovell factory.
“It’s a very unfortunate situation,” Hackman said, speaking on behalf of himself and the factory. “We do not want to see the campaign end early.
“I would love to have seen growers continue to harvest the beets. I wish the piles had stayed stable long enough for us to allow for one more push.“
He said if temperatures stay cold, the beets that are currently in piles should store well.
The 69 seasonal factory employees who are on contract for the duration of the campaign were notified this week of the estimates that the campaign would likely end in late December. Hackman said he waited until the official notice of the end of the harvest was sent to growers before he announcing the estimated end date for the campaign to factory employees. With the letter sent out last week, the estimate for the end of the campaign is now more accurate, he said.
Hackman said he was primarily listening in on the conference call Friday, but he also reported to growers and WS executives about how the Lovell factory was running. Hackman said the factory has been running all right, but certain batches of beets high in lime salts did slow processing down when the juice backed up the filtration inside the factory.
The sugar juice high in lime salts creates more color than desired, producing high raw sugar, which must then be filtered through the system a second time to obtain the white coloring, Hackman said. While re-filtering the high raw sugar doesn’t cost the factory much extra time, it does increase the cost for the factory to produce its final product.
Beets high in lime salt have been delivered to the factory several times during the current campaign, Hackman said, which is unusual for Lovell area beets because growing and storage conditions are normally ideal.
The many challenges of the current campaign have caused factory workers to make some adjustments to keep up with which beets were being processed in a given week, switching from piles to truckloads and back to piles again.
“Normally, we work our way through each of the piles and we have a stable flow of beets throughout the campaign,” Hackman said. “This year, we’re doing small harvests, small pushes. We had to jump around a lot, sometimes changing piles twice a day, once at 6 a.m. and again at 6 p.m. That causes the need for a lot of change in process parameters. It’s been a tough campaign for us trying to find the sweet spot where we can get beets to process.
“As tough as it is for us, I can’t imagine being in the shoes of the growers,” he added.
The Western Sugar cooperative is grower-owned. The Lovell factory processes beets from 70 growers in northwest and central Wyoming.