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Sugar factory campaign one of the best

By
David Peck with the Lovell Chronicle, via the Wyoming News Exchange

LOVELL — Western Sugar factory manager Shannon Ellis reported on a successful and productive 2022-23 campaign as the guest speaker at the March 20 Lovell Area Chamber of Commerce membership luncheon.
 
The campaign was “really good,” Ellis said, noting the campaign ran for 137 days and the factory sliced 407,438 tons of beets, 2,965 tons per day, producing 1,224,535 hundred weights of sugar, 8,912 hundred weights per day.
 
Average sugar percentage for the 2022 crop was 17.52 percent, with an extraction percentage of 85.78.
 
“You bring the beets in, and they have so much sugar in them, and this percentage is how much sugar you get out of them,” Ellis explained. “When you get in the 85s and higher it’s actually excellent. There are a lot of other factories that would love to get that high. It has a lot to do with the quality of the beets. 
 
“The beet quality here is phenomenal, and that helps us make really good sugar,” he added. “There’s a lot of sugar in ‘em, the quality of beets is very good, they store very well here because of how our winters get pretty cool and stay that way, and if it warms up and cools down a lot, that deteriorates the beets. Here, we have pretty steady winter, and that really helps us with our process, too.”
 
The daily hundred weights average of 8,912 was the sixth best in the history of the factory, Ellis said, going back to the 1940s with the data Ellis has avai
lable to him.
 
“That’s a pretty good year,” he said.
 
The average slice per day, 2,965 tons, was 14th in factory history, Ellis added, so “we’ve got some room to improve there, but it’s still pretty good for the year.”
 
On average, Ellis said, referring to a sheet he passed around to chamber members, the Lovell factory slices about 3,000 tons of beets per day during campaign, equivalent to 100 truckloads a day, four truckloads per hour. The factory produces around 900,000 pounds of sugar per day in batches of 60,000 pounds each; each batch would fill the average household bedroom.
 
The four sugar bins hold 30 million pounds of sugar, enough to make 500 million Snickers bars or 500 million cans of pop. If loaded into semi-trailer trucks, the line of trucks end to end would stretch for 15 miles.
 
“Throughout the whole year we’re shipping sugar; we try to ship out about four or five full rail cars that hold about 2,000 hundred weights per car, and we ship about four or five of those out per day just to keep up so we don’t overload the bins,” Ellis said, noting that the shipping rate is equivalent to filling the four silos three times per year.
 
Now that campaign is over, the factory staff is turning its attention to equipment upgrade, cleaning and repair work during the interim period, Ellis said. 
 
The projects include a new trackmobile to move bulk rail cars around for loading sugar, molasses and pellets.
 
“It’s a safer way of doing it,” he said. “When I first started they were using a loader and a cable (to move train cars). That is not the way to do it.”
 
The crew will also replace the beet wheel this year, part of moving beets up and into the factory, Ellis said. The current wheel has been in place for decades, he added.
 

 
Also planned is work on the silo sugar elevators to improve safety. A device called a cannon will be used to help alleviate sugar dust, which is highly explosive, in the three elevators leading into the silos. The cannons will blow a fire suppressant into each elevator leg. If it gets too hot or if a disturbance develops, it will recognize the situation and snuff the flame out. The cannon will be placed in each elevator leg that conveys the sugar from the bottom of the silos to the top.
 
Ellis recalled an explosion at the Scottsbluff sugar factory that flattened that factory’s solos several years ago, adding, “We’re very conscientious about keeping our sugar dust under control.”
 
Work is also planned for the lime kiln, evaporators and the heat exchangers that keep the juice hot.
 
Ellis also explained a chip recovery project that will allow the factory to recover the small beet pieces that break off during the loading process. There’s already a system in place, but work will be performed to improve the process of recovering the chips to make sugar out of them.
 
Probably 120 tons of beet chips go out every day, he said, adding, “There’s quite a lot of sugar to be made with that.”
 
Ellis said weather and the growing season play a role in the quality of the local sugar beets, but the growers are the real key.
 
“The farmers do a great job around here,” he said. “In fact, we have some of the best beets in the country around here … The cool nights and the warm days, that really puts the sugar into the beets.”
 
During late summer sampling, the sugar content is quite low, Ellis said, but when the cool nights and warm days come along in September, the beet tries to live through the winter and takes energy out of the leaves and puts it into the beet.
 
“That time is really critical,” he said. “It’s kind of a double-edged sword. We want to leave the beets in the ground as long as we can, but we don’t want to freeze them in the ground, which does happen at times. The ag guys are always trying to play that game, to try to get the beets out but leave them in long enough to get more sugar in them. And they also grow and get more tonnage.
 
“We’re blessed around here because of the weather conditions. Once it cools down here it usually stays that way, and that really holds the beet quality in good shape for us.”
 
One of the major byproducts of the sugar making process is molasses, which in the case of the Lovell plant is transported to Scottsbluff for refining. Pulp and pellets are also used by cattle producers to feed their cows.
 
Ellis said sugar prices are “very good” right now, selling at around $50 per hundred weight on average. Ellis said the factory currently employs 39 people year-around, with an additional 70 hired during campaign. 
 
“That’s getting very difficult to do,” he added.
 
This story was published on April 6, 2023. 
 
 

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