After 150 Years, California’s Sugar Beet Industry Comes to an End

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In August, farmer Jason Taylor pulled 77.9 tons of sugar beets per acre out of his 3,300 acres of fields in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, setting a world record. (The national average is about 30 tons per acre.) “I just did what I thought I knew best, and everything kind of went right,” he said.

He had germinated the beet plants the previous August and planted them all fall, into November. He got lucky with the planting weather and didn’t have to re-plant any of the fields, he said. He spot-treated the different soil types in the field with nitrogen fertilizer, checking the levels every day.

The beets spent nine months in the ground before he harvested them in the spring and summer. At the end, “they just looked very consistent,” he said. He cut one open. “Not just a good size, but white and clean—real nice.”

Taylor, whose father and grandfathers all raised beets, may be the last Californian to hold the record. At the end of the summer’s harvest, the last beet-processing plant operating in California was shuttered by its owners, the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative, effectively ending California’s 150-year-old sugar beet industry.

In response to the closure’s economic impact, Imperial County has declared a state of emergency, making Taylor’s achievement, as he put it, “bittersweet.” In response to the plant closure’s economic impact, Imperial County has declared a state of emergency. Sugar beets are white root vegetables that are about a foot long and weigh two to five pounds, making them 10 to 20 times larger than red table beets.

Though many people have never heard of them, sugar beets account for just over half of the United States’ domestically produced sugar. The industry is protected by support from the farm bill, which sets an allocation of beet acreage that is divided between producers. The other half of the U.S. sugar supply comes from sugar cane, grown in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Hawaii.

Only about 15 percent of the sugar consumed in the U.S. is imported. For most of the 20th century, the West—California, Utah, and Colorado—dominated the sugar beet industry.

But in recent decades, the industry has shifted northward, especially to North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan. Though the Imperial Valley might offer the world’s highest beet tonnages, a mixture of lower production costs, modernized processing plants, and federal sugar policies have pushed the crop toward the upper Midwest. The idea of producing sugar from beets dates to 1747, when a chemist at Berlin University began trial experiments.

Beets share an unusual characteristic with sugar cane: They both store their sugars as sucrose, rather than converting them into starch like wheat and other plants. The discovery failed to attract attention from investors, and so it sat unused for 50 years. During the first decade of the 1800s, geopolitics brought that discovery back.

With the Haitian Revolution, France lost control of its key sugar plantations. In its aftermath, Napoleon Bonaparte blocked all imports from England’s colonies, not wanting them to benefit from France’s losses. He also revived the Berlin researcher’s sugar beet efforts, investing in two small factories near Paris and schools for beet-sugar manufacturing, and eventually imposed a prohibition on all cane-sugar imports.

By 1812, France had 40 factories producing over 3 million pounds of sugar annually. Countries across Europe rushed to follow France’s lead, and in the 1830s, the first beet-sugar processing plants were built in the United States. Factories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Utah, and elsewhere all failed: Farmers and engineers in the U.S. didn’t have the necessary training and experience with the crop.

Finally, in the 1870s, two Germans who had worked in the beet-sugar industry in their home country began operating the first successful U.S. plant near present-day Fremont, California. By the 1920s, beet-growing was established from the Pacific to the Upper Midwest.

Similar to the way the early U.S. sugarcane industry had depended on enslaved workers, the sugar-beet industry relied on arduous, low-wage field labor undertaken by Mexican, Japanese, Filipino, and Native American workers. The Imperial Valley is located in the southeastern corner of California, bordering Mexico and separated from Arizona by the Yuma and Chocolate mountain ranges. It is one of the hottest counties in the country, with 100-degree temperatures lasting a third of the year.

Yet the desert valley’s Imperial Irrigation District also holds the Colorado River’s single largest entitlement, affording the county billions of dollars in agricultural production each year. Farmers began planting beets in the Imperial Valley in 1932, shipping them by rail to factories elsewhere in Southern California. The valley got its own plant—the recently closed factory in Brawley—in 1947.

Because of the region’s hot weather, the beet seasons were flipped compared to other areas. Instead of planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall, Imperial Valley farmers planted in the fall, let the beets grow through the temperate winter, and harvested in the spring and summer. The crop did well. “It’s probably the most favorable place in the world to grow beets,” said Stephen Kaffka, a cooperative extension specialist at the University of California, Davis. “You have world-record levels of sugar production per acre.” As the reason for this, he pointed to experienced growers, relatively abundant and low-cost Colorado River water,

and low transportation costs—“30 miles of trucking on flat ground.” The constraint, meanwhile, was the heat: Once the beets were out of the ground, the beets would respire and their sugar content would begin to decline. Eventually, they began to rot.

That meant that over the course of the season, extraction became less and less profitable. In 1970, 310,000 acres of sugar beets were harvested in California.

Through the end of that decade, 10 beet-sugar processing plants were operating across California’s central coast, the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, Orange County, and finally Brawley. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the industry was supported by the Jones-Costigan Amendment—also known as the Sugar Act—a combination of tariffs on sugar imports and subsidies to farmers that had originally been instituted as part of the New Deal, intended to help domestic growers compete with foreign cane imports.

But when the Sugar Act expired in 1976, things started to decline. Though the International Trade Commission recommended that President Jimmy Carter impose a quota on sugar imports, he instead developed a subsidy program for farmers. Large sugar companies, seeing their profits plummet, moved to get out of the business, and across beet-growing regions, growers’ cooperatives purchased local plants.

Yet in some places, farmers couldn’t come up with the funds, and many sugar factories across the country closed in the ensuing years. “That was a big surprise to a lot of people, how quickly almonds and pistachios expanded. It was like printing money.”

Policy wasn’t the only reason for the closing plants. In California, higher-value crops also displaced beets. For many years, while federal policy kept sugar at a relatively fixed price, the price for other crops kept rising—especially nuts.

“That was a big surprise to a lot of people, how quickly almonds and pistachios expanded,” said Kaffka. “It was like printing money.” Finally, beet sugar production depends on sugar mills that are expensive to build and operate. Many of the factories in the American West had been built in the early 20th century.

They were designed to process relatively small quantities of beets and needed substantial investment to be maintained and updated. By 2001, there were only two plants left in California—the Brawley plant and a plant in Mendota, near Fresno.

Not coincidentally, they were also the youngest factories in the state, built in 1948 and 1963, respectively. Since 2008, as part of the farm bill, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture (USDA) has set a sugar allotment for the nation—an acreage, representing about 85 percent of estimated domestic consumption, that is divided among sugar processors. Currently, the allotment stands at about 1.1 million acres. (The Imperial Valley had 30,000 acres.) For comparison, in 1950 the U.

S. grew just under a million acres of beets—and yields have multiplied since then. The 2024-2025 season saw a record-high beet harvest.

As beet acreage has declined in the Western U.S., the Upper Midwestern states of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Michigan have made up the difference. Though beets came to the region later than to California and the West, about 60 percent of the crop’s acreage is now there.

Both regions aim for about 18 percent sugar content in their beets. But the fact that beets spend more months growing in the Imperial Valley means bigger beets—a tonnage per acre that is double the Upper Midwest yields, according to Tom Peters, a sugar-beet agronomist at North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota. “It has to do with the length of the growing season,” Peters explained.

Where the Midwestern winters mean that beets only have about six months to grow, Taylor’s record-breaking beets were in the ground for nine. “That’s what really dictates the size of them.” Still, the Midwest offers several advantages over the West. Because growers can rely on rainfall, instead of irrigation, they achieve lower production costs.

The cold climate also means that factories can be run for a slightly longer season than they can in California. “We made the difficult decision to close the Brawley factory and carefully focus our resources on the Renville, Minnesota factory.”

In the Imperial Valley, beets have to be left in the ground until just before harvest, so that they don’t lose sugar content through respiration. In the Midwest, it’s cold enough that “they make these gigantic piles that they deliberately freeze, and as fall and winter go along, they just cut frozen chunks of beets [to process],” explained Kaffka.

Finally, many of the Midwest’s processing plants are much newer than those in the West. In 2005, the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative (SMBSC) bought California’s two remaining factories. Three years later, the cooperative shuttered the plant in Mendota and shifted its corresponding acreage to Minnesota.

Now, it appears that they have made a similar calculation in Brawley. In April 2025, SMBSC announced in a press release that it would cease operations at its Brawley plant at the end of the year’s harvest.

“We made the difficult decision to close the Brawley factory and carefully focus our resources on the Renville, Minnesota, factory given its strong performance and updated technologies,” SMBSC president and CEO Paul Fry said in a press release. SMBSC declined multiple requests for comment from Civil Eats.

The press release stated that SMBSC had invested close to $100 million in the Brawley factory for improvements and repairs, but that it would have required another $100 million dollars to make it profitable. “They have a state-of-the-art facility in Minnesota, so it’s hard not to take advantage of the factory that they already have and use it at higher capacity,” Peters said. At the same time, the federal sugar allotment also played a role.

SMBSC turned down local offers to purchase the sugar factory, preferring to sell it for parts at a lower price in order to keep control over the beet-growing acreage associated with it. “They cannibalized [in Mendota], and basically they’ve now done that to Imperial,” said Kaffka, adding that ending California’s beet industry also meant losing the century of science that had gone into honing growers’ ability to cultivate the crop. “‘It’s business’—as they say in The Godfather.”

On Sept. 9, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors declared a state of emergency due to the economic impact of the loss of the sugar beet industry. In an assessment for the county, economist Michael Bracken of Palm Desert, California’s Development Management Group, estimated the closure would result in $35 million in lost wages and $242 million in overall economic impact.

Though sugar beet growing is highly mechanized, the plant was directly responsible for 249 full-time jobs and supported 700 more in industries like trucking, fertilizer production, and machinery. “We’re in a very depressed valley, with unemployment anywhere from 18 to 20 percent,” said Board of Supervisors member and longtime sugar beet farmer John Hawk, “and would like to work with the government and our legislators to help our economy.”

The loss of the industry has other impacts, too. Imperial County farmers have tended to use sugar beets as a rotation crop alongside forage crops for livestock like alfalfa and Bermuda grass, as well as onions. Hawk explained that the loss of the beet industry would have “a ripple effect,” because farmers would now plant more forage crops, resulting in oversupply and lower prices. “Forage crops are already pressured downward and are now going to have further pressure.”

To address these impacts, Hawk and other county supervisors recently traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with California representatives about adding acreage for California beets to the farm bill’s federal sugar allocation, allowing them to revive the industry. They are also looking into producing biofuel from beets that could be used as an alternative to gasoline or diesel, an idea based in part on research conducted by Kaffka.

Bringing back the industry is a long shot: Legislating the farm bill is a slow process even under the best of conditions. The main obstacle here is the need for an updated processing plant. “They’d have to build a new factory instead of repairing the existing one, which the Southern Minn guys won’t let them do,” Kaffka said.

Hawk agreed. “If we could build a plant and we could process sugar, [the government] would have a hard time saying no to us for an allocation,” he said. “But who wants to build a $600- to $700-million plant without a guarantee?” For now, farmers are planning for a future without beets. “Everybody’s in the same boat, negotiating with their landlords to lower the rent until the prices get better for forage crops,” Taylor said. “Others are cutting back or cutting hours back—it’s slow.

Everyone’s feeling the hit, and we’re probably going to feel it more so before we realize how bad it felt and before we get past it.” He added that the specialized equipment he’d invested in over the years—harvesters, toppers, and other implements—were sitting unused, but that he wasn’t going to get rid of them yet.

“I know the whole valley would like to see the sugar industry back here,” he added. “We were the best in the world.”