Crop of the Week: Sugar beets

   Sugar is an important source of carbohydrate, the body's primary energy source. Sugar can contribute to the flavor, aroma, texture, color and body of healthy but not-very-tasty foods. It helps bread rise by acting as a food for the yeast. In baked products, it contributes to flavor and crust color as well as prolonged shelf life. Sugar preserves jams, jellies and canned goods against the growth of yeast and molds.

   Sugar beets are the principal source of sugar outside of the tropical areas of the world, where sugar cane is used. Although beets were used for many centuries as food and animal feed, beets for sugar are a relatively recent development. The first beet sugar factory was founded in 1802 in Kunern, Germany.

   In the early 1970s, California and the desert Southwest accounted for about 30 percent of national sugar beet production. The closing of the processing plants in Arizona and California in the 1980s, coupled with the transition to more profitable alternative crops, have contributed to the subsequent drop in acreage in the region.

   In the Yuma area, sugar beets are planted in the fall and harvested in the spring and early summer. When fully grown, a sugar beet is about a foot long, weighing 2 to 5 pounds, and is about 18 percent sucrose. Beet sugar represents about 54 percent of domestically produced sugar. There is no difference between beet and cane sugar.

   The roots are washed, cut into strips and conveyed slowly toward the top of a diffusion tower where hot water is added to extract the sugar from the beet pulp. The sugar is dried and crystallized within granulators, cooled and sold as granulated sugar, blended with flour to make powdered sugar or mixed with molasses to make brown sugar.

   Pulp, the vegetable matter remaining after the beet pulp is pressed and dried, is formed into pellets and used as a nutritious feed for cattle. Molasses, an unrefined sugary syrup is produced by cooking shredded sugar beet for several hours, then pressing the resulting sugar beet mash and concentrating the juice produced until it has the consistency similar to that of honey.

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Source: Kurt Nolte is an agriculture agent and Yuma County Cooperative Extension director. He can be reached at knolte@cals.arizona.edu or 726-3904.