Wyoming Sugar records 25-year high from 2024 harvest
WORLAND — The growers who produced and harvested sugar beets, the haulers that got them to the factory in Worland, and the hard work that happened there at every step of sugar processing — it all added up to make a big year for Wyoming Sugar.
The sugar beet producer had a yield of 1,190,000 hundredweight bags of sugar (59,500 tons), a number the company hasn’t surpassed since 1999.
Statistics
Wyoming Sugar CEO Mike Greear detailed the success of the 2024 season saying the company had 42 growers producing beets last year on a total of just over 13,000 acres.
Growers shipped their beets from fields representing a wide region, spanning Washakie, Big Horn and Fremont County.
Although Greear wasn’t able to share breakdowns by each region quite yet, he said that the 42 growers produced 445,092 tons of sugar beets.
Last season’s crop yielded 33.8 tons of sugar beets per acre on average, and a sugar content average of 19.66% of the beets’ weight.
Top growers
Greear also shared the 2024 Top Grower Awards The top grower was Doyle McKim & Sons Inc. with 18,962 pounds per acre, followed by Nick Geis with 16,492 pounds/ acre; Hamilton Farms with 16,298 pounds/acre; Fairview Farms LLC with 14,857 pounds/ acre and Madden Farms LLC with 14,603 pounds/acre.
Wyoming Sugar Lead Agriculturalist Jacob Bullinger said of the top grower Doyle McKim & Sons, “They were a new grower for us last year out of Big Horn County. They haven’t raised beets for quite a while, so it was fresh ground and that makes a huge difference because you need to let your ground rest from the crop. They weren’t growing beets for probably 20 years. But that was pretty impressive, especially being a brand new grower for us.”
The top producer in the category of total pounds of sugar produced was Michael Vigil Farms Inc. with 16,958,667 pounds.
Challenges, 2024 vs 1999
Compared to this season’s yield of 1,190,000 hundredweight sugar bags, the company was able to produce a record-setting yield of 1,375,000 bags.
Although the yields were similar, a key difference makes this season is all the more impressive. In 1999, the company had beets on 21,000 acres; this season it only took (just over) 13,000 acres to produce a similar amount of sugar.
Both Bullinger and Greear attribute this achievement to having outstanding growers working with better beets than in the past.
“That (1999 season) was before Roundup Ready sugar beets, which have definitely been good for us. They have higher yield in sugar, and all around they’re just a better quality beet,” Bullinger said.
Greear added, “We’re still working on getting as much sugar as we can out of processing. Every year we’re making improvements and getting better at the factory, but the main thing is just that our growers are growing a better crop; they’re growing a bigger crop at a higher sugar content, so we make more sugar per acre. It’s much more efficient.”
This year wasn’t without challenges, but Greear said it wasn’t anything he had not seen before.
“Our diffuser (a device that extracts sugar by osmosis) broke down within five days of processing, and it took two weeks to get that back running. Other than that we had challenges getting our labor force built up, and we had challenges with water; same things we have every year,” he said.
To the water issue, Bullinger added, “On my side of operations, I think we had a lot of water respiration in our beet piles, so that gave us more shrinkage than we normally have. We can attribute much of that to us taking longer to process than we have in the past.”
Offseason plans
Greear gave a brief explanation of what’s going on at the factory right now in preparation for the 2025 season.
“Last fall we did some rail improvements; we’ve got a new 50-pound bagger that we’ll put on the line here shortly, and we just ordered a new slaker. It slakes the lime rock to turn it into milk of lime (solution used to purify sugar beet extract). It’s replacing an existing machine, and it’s a pretty big investment,” Greear said.
Those are the biggest improvements, he said, adding that the company is getting organized now. It has some new items on order and others are ready to go for the next season.
Watching federal changes
As the CEO of Wyoming Sugar, and having experience as Wyoming District 27 House Representative, Greear is well-versed at what to watch for when it comes to policy decisions that affect his industry.
He noted several changes taking place at the federal level in the first several months of the new Trump Administration.
He said, “Day to day, there are different changes coming out of the administration regarding tariffs. Then there’s a constant issue with what we can or can’t do with foreigners in our labor force issue. It’s always a changing environment.”
“I spend a great deal of time on those issues. I spent 18 months as the chief liaison for the sugar beet industry while we negotiated the Farm Bill,” said Greear. “There’s a lot of improvements for our industry in that bill, and we’re still patiently waiting for it to pass … We’re also currently on the second sunset in review of the suspension agreement with Mexico (an agreement to halt sugar import/export to revise pricing), which is going nicely.”
“We’re trying to prevent companies from circumventing the use of domestic sugar,” he said. “That suspension is with Mexico, but then companies are getting refined molasses (sugar bi-product) out of Canada, too. There are hundreds of those issues that I pay attention to, and that’s part of my job; my priorities are marketing our sugar to our marketing group, and to be involved in the policies that affect our industry.”
This story was published on March 20, 2025.