The growers: Eckhardt Farms in La Salle.
Their product: Sugar beets.
Their story: Sugar beet farmer Frank Eckhardt Jr., and his two sons, Steve and David, still get a laugh out of the story about the newcomer to this Weld County farming community and the sugar beet he found by the side of the road.
The young man, who wasn’t from farming country, was told that a sugar beet was an exotic treat and that he should keep his eyes out for them come harvest season. When he did see one of the large white tubers, he pulled his truck over and snatched it up.
This is where father and sons really start cracking up.
“He took it home and tried to fry it – setting off every smoke alarm in the house,” Steve said. “And then he tasted it and knew he’d been had.”
Like that young man, most non-farming folk don’t realize that sugar beets aren’t sweet. The white flesh of the tuber tastes more like a beet than sugar.
A lengthy process including extraction, pressing, carbonation and boiling is required to get the beet ready for the sugar bowl.
“There used to be an old German woman in Greeley who would boil the beets and make a kind of syrup – but even that wasn’t something most people would want to eat,” Frank Eckhardt said. “For the most part, the beets themselves need to be processed before they’re useful to anyone.”
There’s a lot about sugar beet farming that’s not so sweet.
Like all farmers, sugar beet growers are at the mercy of Mother Nature.
Farmers sow the seeds in March and April, and because of the threat of a freeze, harvest them as early in October as possible. The longer they keep the beets in the ground, the more sugar will be harvested. Sugar beets gain, on average, a ton of sugar per acre, per week beginning in mid-August.
“We’ve had years where there was an early snow and the beets froze in the ground,” Frank said. “That just takes away a whole season’s work in an instant.”
Of course drought has been the biggest challenge in recent years. The years when there was a water shortage, sugar beet farmers were limited in the number of acres they could plant. This season the Eckhardts are having the opposite problem.
“The cool, rainy weather has actually slowed down the growth of the beets,” Frank said. “So now we’re looking at a later harvest.”
October is crunch time.
“The closer you get to Halloween, the more tense the guys get at the (sugar beet) dump,” Steve says. “Every day closer to the end of October is a day closer to disaster.”
One machine chops the tops off of the beets and another digs them out of the ground, removes the dirt and deposits them in a truck for transport. Family and friends often are recruited to help.
“The boys usually took October off of school to help out in the fields,” Frank said. Once they were 14, they were allowed to drive the beet trucks to the processing factory.
“There are advantages to growing up on a farm,” Steve said.
The large trucks used to carry the beets to one of the many sugar-processing plants in the area. When Frank started farming, there were processing plants in Windsor, Fort Lupton, Sterling, Brighton, Loveland, Johnston, Eaton and Greeley. Now all the beets go to Greeley, where they are collected and trucked to the processing factory in Torrington, Wyo.
Once the beets arrive at the factory, they undergo a four-phase process. First is extraction. Beets are sliced to increase the surface area and are then placed in a diffuser, which keeps the beet in contact with water for about an hour.
The water becomes “juice” after absorbing much of the sugar from the beet. The beet slices are pressed to extract any remaining sugar. The juice is cleaned through carbonation. Chalk, which absorbs the non-sugars, is grown in the juice. Finally the water is boiled off the syrup until conditions are right for sugar crystals to grow.
Eckhardt Farms has about 530 acres dedicated to beets. On average it yields 25 to 27 tons of sugar per acre. The farm is part of the Western Sugar Cooperative, which was formed in 2002 after two years of negotiations with its predecessor, Rocky Mountain Sugar Cooperative. The co-op owns six sugar beet processing plants, storage facilities and a host of other support facilities and equipment. Its territory is Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado and Montana.
“We’ve been profitable the past couple of years, but the sugar industry is in limbo right now waiting to see what happens with CAFTA,” said Frank, who is active in the Colorado Sugarbeet Growers Association.
The Central America Free Trade Agreement is a comprehensive accord between the U.S. and Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. The agreement, which President Bush signed in early August, was created to equalize tariffs against U.S. exports to Central America.
Eckhardt’s grandparents founded the farm a few miles northeast of Milliken in 1864. They planted sugar beets and tobacco and raised Morgan and draft horses.
The soil, which only has organic matter of .7 to 1.01 percent, most likely wasn’t what made his great-grandparents stop their covered wagon in La Salle, Steve said.
“More likely they choose the spot because it was a flat piece of land with the river nearby,” he said. The Eckhardts cultivate the land with liquid fertilizer.
David jokes that the farmers look tan because they’ve been at the “beach.”
“There’s so much sand in the soil it probably qualifies as a beach,” he said.
Father and sons have kept their sense of humor despite the stresses of farming.
“We hope to keep going as long as we can,” Steve said. “We just do our best and hope we’ll be able to continue for another year.”
