10-14 IAN Sugar in Beets

During a recent conversation with Mark Duffin, Executive Director of the Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Association, Mark brought up the fact that sugar content in the beets might not have been measured as of yet, and since the old cliché says there's no such thing as a bad question, I had to jump in. "How do they analyze how much sugar is in sugar beets? I'm not a chemist. They take samples from each load and they have a lab that tests the sugar percentage and just go off of that. Does weather affect the content of a beet? Yes. A couple of things affect it. The nitrogen in the soil, if the beet is still growing, the plant will put its energy into the tops instead of storing sugar in the root so they try to get the nitrogen to run out so the beet will start storing sugar. This year with the extra heat it appears that a lot of the crop, they had what they called the mineralization of the organic matter in the soil so it kept releasing nitrogen so the nitrogen levels are still a little higher than we would like to see them so the beets are still growing tops instead of storing sugar. The cooler weather usually triggers the beets to starch storing sugar but it is all interrelated between the nitrogen levels and the weather and then just the crop maturing. So it all kind of ties in together with the biology of the plant. Anyway, the yields are looking good.