9-8 FB Sweet tooth

 If you have a sweet tooth, it may be in your interest to find out how this year’s sugar beet crop is progressing in Idaho. I’ll help you out with that in a minute.

 Last year, the price of sugar was a much talked about topic and this year came with plenty of challenges in terms of getting the sugar beets planted given that there was mud everywhere. I caught up with Mark Duffin who is Executive Director of the Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Association and he filled me in: ”Like everyone, with the cold wet spring it was hard to get the crop in, it went in late and was behind schedule, but one advantage of the wet spring was that we got good germination so we have pretty good stands uniformly across the growing area and now that the weather has warmed up, the beets seem to be growing well and most of the growers that I’ve talked to the crop is progressing well and making up a little bit of lost time and is looking better now. What about the sugar market in general this year. Is that on the upside? Generally speaking it looks like it’s stayed quite strong and should for the foreseeable future so that is encouraging. What about foreign buyers for our sugar beets? We don’t export much, we are in import sensitive market, so we are not in the export market although there could be a situation where we start exporting to Mexico through NAFTA but that is not the current situation.