Sugar Beets?

fantasymaker · #1 12/19/12, 09:57 AM

I have traveled and got to learn about a lot of crops but sugar beets have remained tantalizingly out of reach . Ive seen beet trucks and beet plants but don't recall seeing the fields and have never got to spend any time with a beet farmer.
Any beet farmers out there?

uncle Will in In. · #2 12/19/12, 10:09 AM

My Sugar raises red beets, but I doubt if that's what you want to know. LOL

haypoint · #3 12/19/12, 10:12 AM

Lots of Sugar Beets grown in michigan's "thumb" and around Saginaw.
They grow in rich dark soil. They look like other beets, you've seen beets with the tops on in the store?
There is a machine that goes through and chops off the tops. Then a while later they are dug up, sort of like potato harvester. The semis go right into the fields. Not uncommon for 8 wheeled tractors to be used to push the loaded semis out of a field. Michigan allows a greater load capacity on the roads, per axle, so you often see gravel trains with extensions and sugar beets heaped above that! Don't tailgate a beet truck.
When the process beets into sugar, all the dirt that was on them is reclaimed and you can buy top soil from them fairly cheap. Also lime (calcium carbinate) is used to make sugar and you can get that fairly cheap, too. Spread on fields helps raise the ph.

A lot of beets go to hunters for deer bait.

sisterpine · #4 12/19/12, 11:19 AM

I dont know much about sugar beets but someone told me that they make excellant feed for chickens.

DW · #5 12/19/12, 12:13 PM

Lots grown around here. There is a plant in Ft Morgan...full swing right now.

jwal10 · #6 12/19/12, 12:24 PM

A lot are grown in the central part of Oregon. Here on the western side most are grown for seed. Different process. Male rows, female rows for polination, special swather to get through the huge tangle and then combined with a pickup head on the combine whrn dry. We harvest grass seed with the same equipment, early summer (July), change to a direct cut head for wheat (August) and back to the pickup head for sugar beet seed later in the fall Late September). Takes a lot of irrigation water to get them to seed stage....James

unioncreek · #7 12/19/12, 01:11 PM

We raised sugar beets when I was growing up in southcentral MT, there's a sugar beet plant in Billings. When I was growing up the average yield was 20 tons/acre now it runs about 28 tons. Not really labor intensive with modern equipment, but when I was growing up we had -------s from Mexico work in the fields thinning and weeding, we worked right alongside them. They were some of the best workers we ever had and they returned to work for us every year. We paid them a set amount per acre, plus a place to live and their food.

Bob

fantasymaker · #8 12/19/12, 08:32 PM

Could you explain the process to me? Anybody know how many pounds of beets it takes to make a pound of sugar?
Do they make ethanol with them like they do corn here?
Any Idea why they dont grow them in IL? (good corn country)

unioncreek · #9 12/19/12, 08:56 PM

They could be grown in IL, much the same requirements as corn as ar as fertility. I don't know the entire process, but it goes like this. They are washed and peeled, then shredded similar to what hash browns look like they then cook them and press out the liquid. The left over beet residue is either sold for livestock feed or dried and pelleted. The liquid is cooked and evaporated down until its has the consistency of brown sugar, but it's hard and must be ground. Somebody once told me that they bleach the sugar so that its white, but I don't know whether that's true.

The beets in the field are topped to remove the leaf, it's either shredded and goes ack into the soil or put in windrows and cattle then graze it. The beets are polled similar to potatoes with a set of puller wheels for each row. Their then loaded directly onto trucks and hauled to a beet dump where their stored until needed by the factory.

Bobg

Paquebot · #10 12/19/12, 09:35 PM

Sugar beets can be grown anywhere. All that is needed are farmers to grow them and a refinery to process them. Can't have one without the other. There'd still be beets here if there were a refinery. Used to be one in the next town during the 1940s and there was a beet plow on the last farm we lived on. Refinery switched to a canning company when there was no longer a need for sugar in the 1950s.

Martin

K.B. · #11 12/19/12, 09:50 PM

One of Pam's freebie Kindle books from awhile back has a page or two on sugar beets and their processing.
http://www.amazon.com/101-Self-Suffi...+ann+richerson

The author recommends boiling the shredded beets in water, then straining. Reduce the sugar solution by half, then add pulverized or powdered sugar as seed crystals. Let it cool and remove the liquid "molasses" from the crystallized sugar and allow to dry.

I think i remember reading elsewhere that ~10lbs of sugar could be had from around 100lbs of sugar beets.

rancher1913 · #12 12/19/12, 10:27 PM

union creek gives a good nutshell of beets. just got of my shift of hauling sugar beets to the factory--12 hours and 500,000 pounds. i'm close to being sick of beets. if you are really curious the factory in fort morgan will give tours by apoitment.

Paquebot · #13 12/19/12, 10:53 PM

I can get the Bucklunch mix locally from Jung's or Shumway. Sugar content on those are 18% to 20%. Their red mangels are about half that or less.

Martin

blooba · #14 12/20/12, 04:51 AM

Commercial processing involves adding acids to the sugar beets to extract the most possible sugar out of them.

Actually, here is an entire list of different chemicals they use.
http://www.qemi.com/html/sugar.htm

Paquebot · #15 12/20/12, 05:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blooba

Commercial processing involves adding acids to the sugar beets to extract the most possible sugar out of them.

Actually, here is an entire list of different chemicals they use.
http://www.qemi.com/html/sugar.htm

Eh, those are for cane sugar, not beet sugar. Got one for beets?

Martin

oregon woodsmok · #16 12/20/12, 01:44 PM

Growing the beets is easy. Turning them into sugar is not so easy.

The raw beets are probably some pretty good animal feed.

ryanthomas · #17 12/20/12, 01:49 PM

The farmers who lease my family's cropland in the thumb of Michigan sometimes grow sugar beets. I know they're part of a rotation, but that's about the extent of my knowledge of farming them. I grew a couple tons once to try to make sugar beet rum, but I never got around to it. Just gave them to a friend to feed his hogs.

K.B. · #18 12/20/12, 02:44 PM

I recall one of my teachers in elementary school bringing in a sugar beet as part of a lesson. She passed around squares of the cut white flesh and let us try sampling them raw. They were fibrous, but tasted pretty good, actually.

If you had a grinder or shredder that could handle the sugar beets, similar as to what is/was used for mangel type beets to feed livestock, the process of extracting sugar should be a lot less intensive than maple sugar, I would think. The starting % sugar is much higher with beets.

Paquebot · #19 12/20/12, 02:52 PM

Mangels run about 5% sugar. Best you can do with both them and sugar beets is to cook the juice down to a syrup. That's how many do it. Still just as sweet but different form.

Martin

K.B. · #20 12/20/12, 03:06 PM

Modern sugar beets run up to 10-18% sugar by weight, if I recall correctly. My point was that it can be a higher starting point than maple sap (~2% sugar), depending on the volume of water used for this initial extraction.