Western Sugar Celebrates 100 Years of Sugar Manufacturing

“This factory has meant a lot to this valley from Cody to Greybull,” said Ric Rodriguez, a Powell farmer and vice-chairman of the Western Sugar Cooperative Board of Directors.

The Lovell plant alone brings an annual economic impact of $33.7 million — about $20 million of which goes directly to local sugar beet growers, Rodriguez said. 

“Even in down times, it helps get over the hump,” Rodriguez said.

Western Sugar’s total impact is $346 million between payroll, grower payments, purchases and property taxes across all of its six factories.

“We need to keep that industry going, it has been a big part of Lovell and the Big Horn Basin,” said Big Horn County Commissioner Felix Carrizales.

“It is quite an accomplishment and the community understands the importance of having Western Sugar,” said Sen. Ray Peterson, R-Cowley. “Ag will always be here, people will always eat food — may not be the most glamorous, but ag will always be here.”

Rodriguez shared his family’s history of coming to the Big Horn Basin as migrant workers to help with sugar beet production.

“The factory is why a lot of us is still here and it meant a lot to us growing beets and I really believe we have the proper management in place,” Rodriguez said. “This is your factory, that is how we see it. We are a little factory, but one of the best in the nation when you look at our rates. We hope to be around another hundred years.”

One hundred years ago, typical Americans spent one-third of their income on food, double what is spent now, said Lovell Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors president elect Joseph Shumway as he shared other unusual facts about what life was like when the sugar factory was built.

“One thing remains the same: The commitment of Western Sugar to the families and businesses in Wyoming,” Shumway said.

Rep. Elaine Harvey, R-Lovell, said she’d been reading up on the history of sugar production in the Big Horn Basin.

“It has been a fun time seeing how it started and the tenacity of the people who kept it going,” Harvey said. “It comes back to the salt of the Earth are the farmers, and when everything else goes they remain an anchor to the community.”

Harvey said she kept reflecting back on the Code of the West while reading about the area’s history.

“They didn’t need a card in their wallet to tell them how to behave, it was how they lived,” Harvey said.

She then presented factory manager Shannon Ellis with an old Western Sugar pallet branding iron she and her husband found while helping a friend clean out an attic. Ellis said it will be displayed at the factory for everyone to see.

Prior to the factory’s construction in Lovell in 1907, the Big Horn Basin’s beets were sent by train to Billings. The factory brought new neighbors from Mexico and Russia and it wasn’t long before those immigrants were owning the farms, Harvey said.

Now, the factory has about 60 employees on hand in the summer and doubles it during winter processing.

“It is amazing they made it 100 years,” Peterson said.

Today, the factory is able to slice up about 3,000 tons of beets per day and averages around 2,900 tons of beets daily.

“They didn’t make much sugar years and years ago,” Ellis said. He previously estimated it was around 600 hundredweights (33.6 tons) a day compared to today’s 8,500 hundredweights (476 tons).

In all, the factory produced about 1.4 million hundredweights (78.4 tons) of sugar last year.

“It just shows how vibrant of an industry it is, that it can stick around and be successful,” Rodriguez said. “Sugar beets really hang in there, even in low-price years.”

Last fall, Big Horn Basin’s 17,000 acres of sugar beet fields yielded 28.9 tons per acre on average with sugar content at 17.99 percent. That led to a grand total of 491,300 tons of very sweet sugar beets for the 2015 harvest.

The extraction efficiency runs around 84-85 percent, Ellis said. That means for every 100 pounds of sugar within the beets that come in, the plant produces 85 pounds of sugar.

“It is unusual to have such a quality record, so we appreciate the support,” said Western Sugar CEO Rodney Perry. “The community we have has had a great relationship.”

The Lovell factory still maintains some of its original facilities and others picked up over the decades. Some additions are a bit more high tech than what was used 100 years ago — but the end product remains the same.

The evaporators used to be vertical; now they’re horizontal and more efficient, and the slicers have a new approach as well.

The facility used to have a main engine that ran the pumps and other equipment, a main shaft with a belt going to the pump and a boiler to keep everything going, Ellis said. Now it’s a more sophisticated and environmentally friendly process.

“I hope we get it for another hundred years, being a beet grower,” said Rep. David Northrup, R-Powell, noting that agriculture is Wyoming’s third-largest industry. “We’ve progressed quite a bit in ag and want to keep progressing.”

Western Sugar has invested several million dollars in the Lovell factory in recent years and more projects are in the works, Perry said.

As a co-op, it’s owned by those who grow the beets, and investments are being made to ensure the factory continues operating, Rodriguez said.

Some of the upcoming upgrades include automation and supervisor training to improve the factory’s overall performance, efficiency and safety, Perry said.

“It takes a lot of dedicated workers to make it go a hundred years; growers are awesome and committed,” Perry said.  “It is a family facility here; we don’t have that at the other facilities. Our future is to be here a long time, if it is another 100 years, fantastic.

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