Harvest tour digs into sugar beet farming

Posted on October 31, 2024 by Ryan Dahlman

By Cal Braid
Southern Alberta Newspapers
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

On Oct. 16, the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers held their annual harvest tour, and it was a great learning experience for anyone interested in southern Alberta’s agriculture industry. The ASBG is the marketing board that administers quotas for crop growth and negotiates pricing contracts with the processor, Lantic Inc. Its growers collectively farm a 28,000 acre quota of sugar beets in an average year, based on the factory’s capacity to store and process the beets.

Registrants showed up at the Taber Community Centre before 8 a.m. to mingle before heading out on the buses to the farmer’s field. ASBG executive director Jennifer Crowson and communications coordinator Siobhan Gardner handed out homemade breakfast sandwiches and croissants beforehand, and the buses were well stocked with Tim’s coffee to start the day off right. The tour group included attendees from agriculture, sales, finance, the municipality, and the county, among others.

 The bus ride took the group to a farm just a few miles northeast of Lethbridge owned by Gary Tokariuk. The farmer grew a variety of commercial and feed crops in 2024, but the day’s feature crop was, of course, his sugar beets. The group gathered amongst vehicles on a field road next to Tokariuk’s sugar beet crop, which he said was about 75 per cent harvested. His presentation was at an ideal location where the group could easily glance over and see the harvest in three different stages: the bare furrows where the beets had been removed, the rows of beets still in the soil but whose leafy tops had been ‘scalped’ off, and a large patch of rows whose plants were green and still in full leaf.

 Tokariuk was a friendly, funny, and knowledgeable host as he told the group about the factors that played a role in this year’s successful beet crop. The morning was chilly and a rooster occasionally crowed in the distance as he talked and took questions from the group.

 On the family farm, he grew 152 acres of sugar beets germinated from Betaseed, a product that’s rigorously developed and tested for resistance against the worst in weeds, insects, and disease. This year’s beet crop was a ‘200 stand,’ which simply equates to 200 beets in 100 feet of a row. “If you go out there and look, those beets are just about touching…well, they are touching,” he said, admitting that a slightly bigger gap would allow for bigger beets to grow.

 “We have gone to zero till with our sugar beets,” he said. “We soil sample every year, so we know what we need for nutrients. We don’t like to over-fertilize, because then you have trouble with sugar. If you have too much nitrogen in the soil it affects your amino-N, which affects your extraction.” After touching base with his field person that morning, he learned that 75 per cent, or 650,000 tonnes of the ASBG crop had been delivered to the piling station.

 “If you extrapolate that onto 28,000 acres, they’re thinking it’s about a 31 tonne average. I know I’m there for sure here, so it’ll be a good year. But it’s still half the farm to go…so I shouldn’t say anything,” Tokariuk said to laughter from the group, clearly not wanting to jinx himself.

 The beets are grown and sold for their extractable sugar content and the farmer is paid for sugar per acre. “We get our tonnes, we know what our extraction is on our farm, and then we get adjusted tonnes. If I’m a per cent and a half higher extraction here, I’ll gain three or four tonnes that I don’t have to haul.” That matters, because hauling means fuel costs which can add up fast.

 As the Q & A portion of the presentation wrapped up, attendees looked over their shoulders to the rumbling of engines. A beet harvesting tractor and a crop truck moved in from the north slowly and in tandem. The lifter rig at the front of the tractor pulled the beets up out of the ground, then delivered them into a caged receptacle in the rear. From there they were drawn up on a narrow conveyor chute and spit out into the box of the truck travelling right beside it. The vehicles came to a stop at the field’s edge and two young men exited while the tour group milled around the machines for a closer look.

 When discussing days past on the farm when the Tokariuk family let their cows graze on the beet tops, he  told a story about how the animals would often choke on the plants and froth at the mouth. A farmer would have to wander among the herd with a hose ready to shove down the cow’s throat to clear it out. He cracked, “The only thing dumber than a cow…is two cows.” It was good for another laugh.

 The buses took the group back to Taber for what was supposed to be a tour of the sugar factory but was cancelled, so about a dozen people piled into the ASBG board room for a presentation and discussion with a longtime factory employee. It was another window into the process that begins with a beet seed in the soil and ends with the sugar in your bowl on the kitchen table.