Campaign is always a busy time for the Western Sugar Cooperative sugar factory in Lovell, but the 2007-08 campaign has been even busier this year with the addition of a few more thousand tons of beets from Montana, Factory Manager Ray Bode told the Lovell Area Chamber of Commerce Monday.


Speaking at the Chamber’s general membership meeting at Lange’s Kitchen Monday, Bode said the Lovell factory was initially planning to slice around 310,000 tons of sugar beets this campaign based on a harvest of some 15,000 to 16,000 acres of beets in a 45-mile radius of Big Horn and Park counties.


Bode said there was the potential to grow another 2,000 to 3,000 acres in the Emblem area, but drought conditions and low water at Sunshine Reservoir didn’t allow farmers there to plant a crop last year.


“Our crop was fairly typical last year,” Bode said, “averaging around 21 tons per acre and 16 to 17 percent sugar content.”


Planning to slice 310,000 tons of beets this year, the factory received word around the start of campaign that the Billings area experienced “a bumper crop,” Bode said, and the company asked the Lovell factory to slice some of the beets.


“Processing sugar beets is all a matter of timing,” Bode said. “They asked us to take the pile by Bridger, and we agreed. That added another 35,000 tons to our campaign.”


As the campaign progressed, the company realized that beets east of Billings didn’t store well, Bode said, and that the Billings factory would have trouble with processing, again due to timing, so the Lovell factory was asked to take beets from the Fromberg area, which added another 45,000 tons to the campaign for a total of around 390,000 tons of sugar beets for the 2007-08 campaign in Lovell.


“We expect to make a little over a million hundred-weight of sugar this year,” Bode said. “The beets are storing well with very little deterioration.”


The Lovell plant did have one major breakdown around the first of November when the diffuser, the machine that takes the juice out of the beets, was down for about five days. But since then, he said, the campaign has been very smooth.


Asked about the possible impact of the Greybull ethanol plant on the factory, Bode noted that farmers as shareholders in the grower-owned cooperative are under contract with Western Sugar to provide a certain number of beets to the company. Even if some farmers started growing a different crop like corn for ethanol, they would still be obligated to provide a certain number of acres of beets to the sugar factory.


Asked about the economics of corn versus sugar beets, Bode said it’s a complicated issue based on factors like sugar content and tonnage per acre. Plus, farmers receive a bonus for growing extra high quality beets.


“Beets are a money-making proposition,” he said. “I’m not saying there aren’t times when you couldn’t make more money with corn or barley, but we have to have a stable idea of how many tons we will process. We need to know for planning purposes how many acres will be grown.”


Bode added later that the sugar beets grown in the Lovell area are, year in and year out, the best beets in the Western Sugar system. Beets need warm days and cool nights during the growing season, and then when temperatures decrease in the fall, they should stay low to provide for better storage.


Farmers have learned to reduce nitrogen fertilizer at a certain point during the growing season to force the beets to store sugar in the beet rather than grow leafy material, he said, and local farmers do it well.

Bode said the sugar cooperative makes a huge economic impact on the northern Big Horn Basin economy, with payments to farmers for the 2006 crop totaling $18.2 million. Also, the factory paid $42,000 in property tax last year and paid $3 million in wages for permanent and campaign jobs.


The cooperative paid around $1.2 million in freight costs, plus another $272,000 to local vendors. The end result is a direct economic impact of between $20 million and $25 million on the local economy, even before factoring in how many times a dollar turns over in the economy.


Ken Grant asked about the possibility of the factory upgrading appearances from landscaping to the sugar bins. He wondered if the company would be willing to work with organizations to cut weeds, plant trees along the highway and install a sidewalk or bike path.

“On our property?” Bode asked.

“Yes” was Grant’s reply.

Bode said there’s a “good possibility” that the company could work with the community on weeds, but as for trees and a walkway, the biggest concern is liability, noting that many, many trucks roll into the factory during harvest or turn into the beet storage lots.


“That’s a real concern,” he said.


Kim Baumstarck said it would be nice to have a path along the highway into town because pedestrians, horseback riders and others now have to use the shoulder of the highway.


Bode said the community could work with the department of transportation to do something in the highway right-of-way, but he said he couldn’t foresee anything on Western Sugar property because of liability and maintenance concerns, although he said he and company officials would be willing to sit down and discuss the idea.


Asked about the smell from the factory ponds that was such a problem last spring, Bode explained how the smell developed including the amount of organic material in the water and the water turning anaerobic and said the factory took several steps – mostly unsuccessful at the time — to alleviate the smell. Those steps included a masking agent and an agent to inoculate the pond, but the measures didn’t work and the company paid a $20,000 fine to the Wyoming Dept. of Environmental Quality.


Since then, the company has made plans to modify the pond system to aerate the pond that had the odor by bubbling air through it to keep it aerobic rather than anaerobic.


Addressing the fading paint on the sugar bins, Bode said the company would love to repaint the bins but it is estimated to cost around $250,000 to do it. The bins in Billings also need to be painted, he said.


“We’ve love to see them painted as much as anybody else, but we have to live within a budget, too,” he said, adding that some way will have to be found eventually to pay for the bins to be painted in order to protect the concrete.


Bode said the campaign is currently scheduled to wrap up around Feb. 12, and he welcomed anyone to set up a tour of the factory if they would like.