Research of the Week: America Will Import More Sugar This Year Than It Has In 4 Decades
/First came the water. "Ten inches, up to almost 20 inches of rain," Younggren says. The fields in his region were so wet that farmers couldn't work in them.
"After that came the snowstorm, barreling up off the West Coast," he says, followed by a blast of freezing cold. Farmers in his beet-growing cooperative, the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, abandoned more than 100,000 acres of beets, and Younggren is now playing counselor to younger farmers, telling them not to lose hope or blame themselves. "You did nothing wrong," he tells them. "You put the seed in the ground and you matured it ... and somebody else decided that you're not going to be able to harvest it."
About half the United States' sugar normally comes from beets. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the beet harvest was down about 10% this year. The effects are now rippling through America's food industry. Last month, two big sugar producers announced that they won't be able to deliver all the sugar they'd promised to candy-makers and bakers, including Tippin's, a pie-maker in Kansas City, Kan.
