Sugar 101: It’s Harvest Time!

Welcome to harvest season! Sugarbeets and sugarcane are harvested in different ways, but both become the real sugar on your table. It's all thanks to the family farmers and workers whose work sustains rural communities and keeps America sweet. Here is a glimpse into how they do it.

Sugarbeet Harvest

By late August, the seeds our farmers planted in the spring have grown into sturdy roots, ready to be pulled from the ground.

The first step is to defoliate the sugarbeet by removing their leafy tops. The leaves of the beet act as natural insulation, so the timing of this step can change depending on weather or harvest conditions. Next comes a harvester, which lifts the beets out of the ground and shakes off excess dirt.

Instead of using two tractors pulling a defoliator and a harvester, some farmers use a self-propelled harvester that combines both steps into one.

The sugarbeets are loaded into the bed of a semitruck or a beet cart right there in the field to be taken to a receiving station or factory, where the beets are stacked into towering outdoor piles and Mother Nature acts as natural refrigeration. The beets will stay in storage until they move through the factory, so these piles must be carefully managed to minimize spoiling.

Finally, the sugarbeets make their way to the factory, where they're sliced and the sugar is extracted and crystalized.

Quick Facts About Sugarbeet Harvest

• Farmers need to harvest their beets before it gets too cold, or the sugarbeets will freeze in the ground.
• In the Red River Valley spanning Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota, harvest runs for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week if conditions are right. Can you imagine having to fix a broken sugarbeet harvester at 3 AM? This is reality for many farmers!
• Factories will also run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the spring to process the sugarbeets into refined sugar. This is called a campaign.
• No part of the sugarbeet goes to waste! Beet pulp pellets and shreds are used in a variety of ways; it is a premium food source for animals like show horses, or in the pet food you might find at your local pet store. Beet juice is also used in deicing mixtures to help clear roads and runways.

Sugarcane Harvest

Sugarcane is unique in that it is planted in the fall, and it will grow for a full year before it's ready to harvest. That means planting and harvesting overlap. Harvesting begins in mid-September and goes through mid-January in Louisiana and into May in Florida. Some sugarcane operations also harvest 24/7 - our farmers work hard until the job is done!

Rotating scrolls, or the crop dividers, on the sugarcane harvesters feed the cane into the harvester, where the cane stalks are chopped into smaller pieces and the excess leafy material is blown back onto the field. The cut cane is put into a cart which drives alongside the harvester, and which will eventually dump the cane into a semitruck or train car to take to the mill. New shoots will sprout from the sugarcane stubble left in the ground for the next few harvests, which is why all of the sugarcane on a farm doesn't need to be planted annually.

From there, the sugarcane is transported to a nearby raw sugar mill to extract the sugar from the cane. Finally, the raw sugar is transported to a refinery to finish processing and packaging.

Quick Facts About Sugarcane Harvest

• Unlike sugarbeets, which can be stored for months, sugarcane must be processed into raw sugar as quickly as possible after harvest to preserve sugar content and prevent spoilage.
• Bagasse, the fibrous material that's left over after the sugar juice is squeezed out of sugarcane stalks, fuels the boilers in the mills, producing steam and bioelectricity to power operations.
• Florida sugarcane producer U.S. Sugar owns one of largest privately-owned WiFi networks in the world. It covers 270 square miles and allows its tractors to navigate with sub-inch precision.
• Louisiana is the northern-most location in the world where sugarcane is grown.

As you can see, sugarbeet and sugarcane harvest require immense amounts of specialized equipment and skilled labor. Harvest always comes with challenges - like unpredictable weather or equipment failures. But this year, some farmers are facing yet another challenge: they may not even break even on their crop.

In just the past two years, prices for beet sugar and cane sugar have fallen by 42% and 22%, respectively. This dramatic fall in prices coupled with persistently high input costs - up more than 30% since the 2018 - are unsustainable.

We are thankful for the dedication of America's sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers as they bring in the crops that keep it sweet in America.