Sugarbeet Feature Stories

Editor’s Note: David Berg has been an employee of American Crystal Sugar Company since 1987 and became the Moorhead, Minn.-based cooperative’s president and chief executive officer in 2007.  Berg retires as of August 31.  His successor, Tom Astrup, formerly Crystal’s vice president-operations, assumed the presidency in early March and will add the CEO title upon Berg’s retirement at the end of August.

In this interview with The Sugar-beet Grower, David Berg talks about his route to the presidency of American Crystal, challenges faced and challenges met — and some of the accomplishments that have provided the greatest satisfaction for him through the years.

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Dennis and Brian Karg, father-son owners and operators of D & B Karg Farms* near Harbor Beach, Mich., have instituted some big changes in their sugarbeet harvest program during the past several years. Having changed from 30- to 22-inch rows in 2010, two years later they transitioned to a Ropa Tiger eight-row self-propelled harvester (Dozens of their fellow Michigan Sugar Company producers also have gone the self-propelled route.)  For the 2015 harvest, they installed a combination rubber-steel defoliation drum on their Ropa —an important step, Brian says, toward eliminating the need for scalpers.

Last year’s harvest also found the Kargs utilizing a new 4600 Series Crop Shuttle cart manufactured by Kringstad Ironworks of Park River, N.D.  The 46-ton unit, which can unload in about three minutes, usually allows the Kargs to keep up pace with their Ropa harvester with a single cart instead of two.

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Sugarbeet growers and processors applaud the passage of a bipartisan food labeling bill in the U.S. House of Representatives today (July 14) by a vote of 306-117, thus clearing the way for the bill to be signed into law by President Obama.
The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act (S. 764) was approved in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 63-30 on July 7, 2016.
“This bill gives consumers across the country more information than ever before about genetically engineered ingredients in food while still protecting family farmers and small businesses from the costs and confusion of a patch-work of different state labeling mandates,” said Galen Lee, president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association and a sugarbeet farmer from New Plymouth, Idaho.  “The food and agriculture community came together like never before to advance a solution that works for consumers and stakeholders up and down the value chain.”

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Current legislative proposals to change U.S. sugar policy may be positioned as modest reform; but they would have dire economic consequences on U.S. sugar producers, put U.S. taxpayers on the hook — and leave U.S. consumers dependent on unreliable, subsidized foreign suppliers.  

That’s the conclusion of a paper re-leased in mid-May by two Texas A&M University ag economists.

The paper, titled “Analysis of the Coalition for Sugar Reform Amendments to U.S. Sugar Policy: Potential Effect on Policy and Industry,” was pre-pared by Joe Outlaw and James Richardson for the American Sugar Alliance*.  Outlaw is professor and extension economist at Texas A&M, while Richardson is regents professor and Texas Agricultural Experiment Station senior faculty fellow.  The two economists also serve as co-directors of the university’s Agricultural and Food Pol-icy Center.

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For many years, plot harvest for the Michigan Sugar Company Research Department entailed working with a pair of two-row Farmhand harvesters whose origin dated back to the mid-1950s. The machines went through numerous updates from 2000 onward, including the installation of grab-roll cleaning beds, hydraulically driven components and digital scales.

Overall, the harvesters worked quite well; but they were slow and really stretched the harvest season to its absolute maximum. Plus, their limitations restricted the number and geographic scope of research trials that could be feasibly conducted.

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The sugarbeet curly top virus could meet its match in new sugarbeet varieties derived from KDH13, a germplasm breeding line developed by USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) researchers for resistance to the disease-causing pathogen.

Transmitted by small insects called beet leafhoppers, the curly top virus courses through the phloem of susceptible beet plants, wreaking cellular havoc that can manifest as yellow, inwardly curled leaves; stunted growth; and other telltale symptoms.  Severe outbreaks of curly top disease can reduce sugarbeet yields by 30% or more.

Spraying insecticides can prevent leafhoppers from transmitting the virus to plants while feeding; but the preferred approach is to plant sugar-beet varieties that naturally resist the pathogen, notes Imad Eujayl, a molecular biologist with ARS’s Northwest Irrigation and Soils Research Lab at Kimberly, Idaho.

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