It's a sugar high for Wyoming Sugar
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Tracie Mitchell
Wyoming Sugar stores the harvested sugar beets in piles until they are ready to be used. The beets go through a complicated process once at the factory starting with being thoroughly cleaned, before being sliced and rendered into sugar.
WORLAND – With a little over 80 percent of their sugar beets harvested, Wyoming Sugar is pleased with the average sugar content and average tons per acre.
"We have a really good crop. Our sugars are holding at just above 19 percent for company average. It looks like we are just under our estimate of 33.5 tons per acre, which given the increase in sugars, that's a good trade-off," Wyoming Sugar Company President and CEO Mike Greear said.
During the early harvest, which ran from Sept. 12-30, the beets had an average sugar content of 18.3 percent which caused Wyoming Sugar to expect the beets harvested during the regular harvest to be around or a little over 19 percent and they were right.
The company had a little scare when the temperatures dropped into the teens the second week of October but Mother Nature saved the day bringing in warmer temperatures quickly. "It looks like we dodged a bullet with that. But we are still watching what we put in the piles closely to make sure there is no spoilage, so far so good," Greear stated.
Wyoming Sugar hopes to have all the beets harvested by Halloween, Oct. 31, and predicts that they will process them through January 2019. "With our current slice rate we will be finishing up at the end of January," Greear said.
