UP / Thumb of Michigan | JTN - 10/16/2025 07:50
Cercospora leaf spot was out of control in are area this year, growers sprayed 4-6 times and still had poor control,most of the fields had a complete melt down in Sept and started regrowing tops…Main harvest sugar is in the 15% area normal start of the campaign it should be 17+.
Tons per acre is used all the time in beet talk by news agencies, it doesn’t mean squat….LBS of sugar is what you get check for…30 tons a 15% or 25 tons at 18% both = 9000;)
I think cercospora was an issue in Michigan as well.
Is there a certain variety or brand that seems worse this year?
Back when we grew beets ( and this was quite a while ago now) all our approved varieties were cercospora resistant. They were also very yield resistant too. We were offered to try a variety (I think H 33 rings a bell) that % did much better on sugar and tons, but it had to be sprayed for leaf spot. We sprayed 2X every year, thought we were cutting a fat hog. Liked the variety better than anything else, but it also wasn't very resistant to rhizoctonia either. Got pulled from the approved list due to that I think.
We figured we picked up quite a lot of yield with that variety. I don't know why the yield is generally so much higher today though. Is it that the old herbs were really as hard on them as we suspected? Is it because the disease resistance is less now? Something else?
Not sure at all how it is now- but you guys out west were WAY ahead of us as far as a "sugar" contract back when we were growers. Every time there was something attempted, an unintended consequence showed up. The company, rather than just pay on sugar produced, started doing a bonus program. You got a bonus if you were + factory average. Sounds good on paper, but the reality was that the bonus was coming out of the checks who were below factory average. And generally speaking, it was things out of a growers control that would cause that. So anyway, you had some guys (from Saginaw County for the most part) who figured they were buying new pickups for guys from Huron County. It was very contentious. The right and easy way to do it was to simply just pay everyone for the pounds of sugar produced per acre. Get rid of the bonus program. And maybe thats what eventually happened, don't know. The last 5 years we were growing beets still had that nonsense going on, it was reason #3 or 5 why we didn't sign a contract. It was just like us supposed to be adopting the metric system. Get ready for it, its coming. And then right before it does happen, someone decides its just too easy to keep things status quo. Never mind. |
Sugar beets in Minnesota
