STERLING — Trucks loaded with sugar beets for early harvest started rolling into the receiving station here last Wednesday.
 

Carol Barrett/Journal-Advocate Sugar beets roll up the conveyor belt onto the pile at the Sterling station. The white truck has already dumped its beets and is waiting to receive its tare. Dirt removed from the beets will be put back into the truck before it is weighed "empty." Carol Barrett/Journal-Advocate Workers at the Sterling station make sure this truckload of sugar beets is cleaned and then moved along the conveyor system toward the beet pile. The yellow-painted cab of the dump truck can barely be seen at the right.

“The early harvest primes the pump, so to speak. And everything went pretty well this year,” said Stewart Norrish, senior agriculturist for Western Sugar in Colorado — which includes Big Springs and Ogallala, Neb., as well. The beets from Sterling are hauled to the sugar factory in Fort Morgan for processing. Norrish said the factory started up Oct. 1, and will continue to run until all the beats harvested this fall are processed into sugar. “The early season gives growers a chance to get some of their beets out of the ground and processed,” Norrish said. He said the regular season started Oct. 8. The beets that are being dug now won’t store well because the weather is too warm, he said. Those dug later, after the weather cools, can be piled up and stored at the various receiving stations and at the Fort Morgan plant. If the fall and winter weather stays cold, the beets store relatively well. If the winter turns out to be a warm one, there will be more spoilage. Norrish hopes all the beets will be dug by the first week of November, if the weather allows growers to keep digging beets.

.“Sugar content was about 15 percent for early harvest, which is about average,” Norrish said.

After the weather gets colder, the sugar content will rise some.

“Everybody we talked to was pleased with their tonnage (tons per acre),” he added.

Overall, there may be fewer beets and less sugar processed at the Fort Morgan plant this year than last year.

“Last year, we had a 30 percent over-plant,” Norrish said, meaning that beet growers took a chance and planted 30 percent more acres than they had contracted. “This year, it’s one-to-one (with the contracted acres).”

Carl Schoenfelder, factory manager at Fort Morgan, said, “We started at 8 a.m. Oct. 1, Monday. We ramped up the machines a little at a time last week, and turned up the dials. Now we’re at what we consider standard.”

He said they will probably have to adjust the dials again a couple of times, but that isn’t a problem.

“We expect the campaign to run 126 days,” Schoenfelder said.

So if all continues to run smoothly, the sugar factory will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, into the early days of February.

The company can predict the length of the campaign more accurately this year because the acres that were actually planted to beets matched the contracted acres.

Western Sugar contracted with an employment service this year to hire the people needed to work during the campaign.

“We still have a few positions to fill,” Schoenfelder said. “Mostly in the lab, and a few in the factory, too.”

Carol Barrett: (970) 522-1990, Ext. 238; cbarrett@journal-advocate.com