Food For Thought: Chatham-Kent has 84 farmers who grow beets on 10,000 acres

By Kim Cooper, Special to The Chatham Daily News
Thursday, December 15, 2016 2:02:30 EST PM

What do you get when you have 11 University of Guelph agriculture students, one old guy (me) in a van heading to Croswell, Mich. to tour the Michigan Sugar Company facility? A great time for sure!

I was invited by Paige Handsor to accompany this young and brilliant group in October. Paige’s father Harvey is one of the sugar beet growers in Chatham-Kent, and I’m thankful she was able to arrange this tour.

I had never been to the Croswell facility. This is the destination of all our Chatham-Kent-grown sugar beets. Did you know that Chatham-Kent is Canada’s second largest producer of sugar beets?

The tour was amazing and very informative. We learned so much from Keith Kalso, agriculture department manager and his assistant Glenn Martus, from Michigan Sugar. They in turn were quite impressed with the many detailed questions that came from our students.

The Michigan Sugar Company has six facilities, which includes Bay City, Sebwaing, Caro, Croswell, Carrollton (storage and value added processing), as well as AmCane Sugar Company in Taylor, Mich. and Toledo, Ohio. AmCane receives world cane sugar and melts and processes value-added products as well as selling liquid sugar.

It’s been almost 20 years since farmers brought sugar beet production back to Ontario. Since then, the industry has expanded from 268 acres and nine growers to approximately 84 growers producing a crop on over 10,000 acres.

The Croswell facility slices over 80 semi truckloads of sugar beets every day during the harvest period which runs from late August to late March. From these beets, the plant produces 1.2 million tons of sugar every day. That is a lot of sugar beets and a lot of sugar!

Michigan Sugar Company is a co-operative which is owned by growers who have contracts to grow sugar beets for them. So each of our Chatham-Kent growers is a co-operative member and they pay a share in the company to grow the sugar beets.

Sugar is derived basically from sugar canes and from sugar beets. There is generally 18 per cent sugar yield from sugar beets and 14 per cent sugar yield from sugar cane. Our growers are paid on recoverable white sugar per ton of sugar beets.

The price of sugar in the U.S. is very complex and is regulated by the U.S. Farm Bill. The U.S. has to import large quantities of sugar in order to meet the increasing demands.

Here in Canada, all our imported sugar comes from sugar cane. There is a very high tariff on sugar which comes from sugar beets. But there is no tariff on sugar coming from sugar cane. The reasons are political and a strong lobby from the current Canadian importers of sugar.

In 1995, Michigan Sugar Company came to Ontario looking for more acres as some of their U.S. growers were cutting back on growing sugar beets. Since that time, the company has been very pleased with the quality of the sugar beets they receive from Ontario, which are grown in Chatham-Kent and also in Lambton County.

When our growers started back with sugar beets in 1995, they delivered their crop to a central piling yard in the north Chatham area and then it was shipped to Michigan for processing.

There is a new on-farm delivery system that was developed here in Chatham-Kent. During the sugar beet harvest, you may have seen piles of sugar beets by the roadside, which is then loaded onto semi-trucks by an innovative ‘mouse’ conveyor system and then sent to Michigan. The majority of our sugar beets are still sent to the central piling yard, where they are further transported to Michigan.

Today, new sugar beet innovations involve looking beyond sugar production at new market opportunities like ethanol to help growers continue to expand.

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Think about this – With God, there is hope even in the most hopeless situation.

Just some food for thought.

Here in Chatham-Kent ‘WE GROW FOR THE WORLD’. Check out our community’s agricultural website at www.wegrowfortheworld.com

Kim Cooper has been involved in the agribusiness sector for over 40 years. He can be reached at: kim.e.cooper@gmail.com

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