Sugar beet growers show what a century of practice looks like

Posted on August 6, 2026 by Ryan Dahlman

By Carl Rodrigo
Southern Alberta Newspapers

The Alberta Sugar Beet Growers held its annual Plot Hop and Luncheon on July 22 in Taber, Alta. A morning tour that gathered attendees at the Taber civic centre for coffee and registration, a school bus drove the attendees to two working farms , and brought them back for lunch at the Royal Canadian Legion at noon. The purpose was simple – to show people up close how Canada’s only homegrown source of sugar is grown. But the real draw wasn’t the itinerary. It was standing in the dirt while the growers themselves explained everything we were looking at. 

The point, organizers said, was access. Roughly 200 farm families grow sugar beets across southern Alberta, and most people never see the crop up close. The Plot Hop opens the gate. 

At the first stop, grower Tom Lievaart walked the group past a research plot and into a practice most of his neighbours skip, he builds ridges in his fields in the fall, then knocks them down in the spring to plant into buried moisture – it buys him time. “Then I’ll be able to seed, and I’ll seed just a nice inch deep in the moisture. So that way, in the spring, I can get away with seeding earlier because I’m seeding in the moisture because we ridged and de-ridged.” said Lievaart. Some years a timely rain makes all that work pointless. “But that’s farming though. We do what we can.”

Lievaart also spoke about how hard the crop is to kill once it gets going. A late-spring frost that would flatten his dry beans barely registers on beets. “Once they are growing, they are pretty tough to knock down,” he said. “Even with hail too, they just come right back.”

Standing in the same field, Rogers Sugar’s research lead Jay Anderson explained the variety trials laid out in flagged strips behind him – dozens of varieties tested six times over, each one required to outperform the current standard three years running before it reaches a commercial field. It is slow, unglamorous science, and it is the reason the beets in the surrounding rows exist at all. 

The second stop belonged to Brady Valgardson, whose family has grown beets in the area since the early 1900s. “Family tradition, I guess,” he said. The field he was standing in wasn’t even his – he trades land with potato farmers so both can keep the four-year rotation crop demands. 

Valgardson is, by his own description, a minimalist. He aims for two herbicide passes a year and skips the insecticides and fungicides other crops need. That simplicity, Valgardson said, is recent. Beets went to Roundup Ready seed in around 2009, and the crop that once needed crews of hand-weeders changed character entirely. “This used to be our most difficult crop to grow,” he said. But now, an attendee – a longtime farmer – jumped in, it is the easiest: the one in the rotation that cleans up the land. 

History sat close to the surface all morning. The Executive Director of Alberta Sugar Beet Growers, Jennifer Crowson – who organized the field tour – reminded the attendees that the industry marked its 100th year in Alberta last year, back when harvest meant machete-like knives, a hook, and a horse-drawn wagon. The through line to the trial plot and vacuum planters of today was hard to miss.  

Some of it was simply craft. Valgardson talked about augering soil samples four feet down in near‑frozen fall ground — “a horrible job… awful,” he said — to dial in his nitrogen so his beets carry enough sugar to avoid a penalty at the scale. Too much fertilizer swells the beet but thins the sugar. “The whole thing is kind of stupid if you think about it that way,” he added. “You really want to get your soil sampling right.”

By 11:30 a.m. the bus was back in Taber and the crowd was headed for lunch at the Legion, carrying with them a clearer picture of a crop that is, start to finish, grown, harvested and refined within a single stretch of southern Alberta — and the people who have spent a century learning how.