Beet campaign underway

Strong crop and factory upgrades positive for Western Sugar Co. 

As the summer begins to wind down and the fall harvest season approaches, the Western Sugar Company Lovell factory is ready for another campaign with several summer projects having been completed or underway.

Factory manager Shannon Ellis said Tuesday that the 2025 campaign began Monday with a cold test-out, where factory workers run water through the processing system to check for leaks or problems. Then on Tuesday the crew conducted a hot test-out in which they started boilers and after heating water put steam through all the lines to make sure all the systems work.

With everything looking good, slicing was to begin Wednesday at 6 a.m. as early harvest commenced.

Early harvest is done annually to get the campaign rolling and the factory running before the main harvest begins in mid-October.

“We just harvest enough to keep the facility running, and so we just keep a couple of days on the ground, and then we use them up because of the weather. You know, it’s so darn warm right now,” Ellis said. “They won’t store very well, so we just keep two days on the ground most of the time. And we’ll use those up and then they’ll have some more for us to use. We don’t start stockpiling until the weather gets better and it cools off.

“It’s basically just trying to get the crop harvested and processed, because the later you go in the spring, the worse the beets get because they’ve sat there all winter and when you start getting these warm cycles, they start deteriorating. And so they can get really bad in the spring.”

The ventilated storage on the south side of the highway west of the factory helps a lot, Ellis said, adding, “That’s the last pile we use, and it actually holds up quite well.”

The 2025 beet crop looks excellent, Ellis said, a bumper crop in southern Montana around Bridger and another excellent crop in the Lovell growing area similar to last year at 29 to 30 tons per acre and a high sugar content once again, based on sampling.

“They think it’s going to be really close to last year, and last year was really good,” Ellis said. “Actually, last year’s sugar content was a record. So if it comes close to that, that would be great. I think we averaged a little over 18% sugar in there. So that’s a lot of sugar in those beets.”

Tonnage in the Bridger area is even greater, Ellis said, likely to be in the 35 tons per acre range, and so to balance out and time factory operations, the Lovell factory will process some of the Montana beets, with trucking mileage roughly the same for Bridger sugar beets to either the Billings factory or Lovell.

“We want to start and stop close to the same time (as the Billings factory),” Ellis said, “so if something happened to one of the facilities, we could take those beets to the other facility.”

Weather has been perfect for growing this summer, Ellis said, and fall is looking good as nights cool down. He said just short of 14,000 acres of sugar beets have been grown in the Lovell factory district this year.

Factory upgrades

Meanwhile, the Lovell factory has seen four major projects completed or underway this summer, Ellis said.

First, a new passenger elevator is in the works for transporting crew members and equipment between the first and fourth floors. The former elevator, constructed several decades ago, has been out of service for more than a year, Ellis said.

“We have been doing some maintenance at the top for the structural work on it because we had to change everything since the original elevator was quite old, put in a long time ago, the 30s, probably,” Ellis said. “They’re supposed to be here this week to finish it. All the components are here, and we have everything ready for it. It’s just not all installed yet.”

The second project was the installation of two new pulp presses brought from the Scottsbluff factory after an upgrade there.

“The presses were used but were in very good condition. They had upgraded and put some even bigger presses in, so we stole them,” Ellis said with a laugh. “Actually, they gave them to us. They’re quite a bit bigger than our original presses, so we have five pulp presses and we’ve actually replaced two of them. But they’re considerably bigger and so they’ll be more robust, and they actually process more.

“They’re good, and they’re ready to go. OK. It’s going to be very good for us.”

Project three is a new motor control room that will take two or three years to complete. The project will allow the company to replace outdated electrical equipment, and the first step is the construction of the room itself.

“We’ve actually got the concrete poured and the structural steel here for it,” Ellis said. “Next, probably in, like, another two years, we’ll phase this in.”

Ellis said the room will sit on the west side of the factory and will house upgraded equipment similar to large breakers called disconnects.

“A lot of what we have is really outdated, so we’re trying to upgrade that to where we’re a lot more to code,” he said. “Again, some of that probably goes back a long time ago. There’s some of it that actually, they say, could be in a museum.”

The fourth project is the installation of two new slicers, which were lowered into place by a tall crane this summer, Ellis said.

The Western Sugar Company continues to invest in and upgrade the Lovell factory, now 109 years old, and Ellis said it’s great to see the many improvements made.

“It’s just a relief to be able to upgrade things and know that they have your back,” he said. “It’s just nice to have that. They’ve put a lot of money into this facility to try to keep it up to snuff to where we keep running like we have our expectations.”