Giant Sugar Beet in Brawley
In this week’s Home Grown we head to Brawley, California to have a look at something very unique that was recently pulled out of the ground.
After eight months in the ground, growers at AMC Farms pulled out a 72 and a half pound sugar beet.
Brawley is the only place where there is a sugar beet factory in the whole state of California.
To put in perspective just how unique this sugar beet is, the average sugar beet weighs around 15 pounds. This 72 pounder is hoping to break some records.
“Currently, we are looking to see if it’s the Guinness Book of World Record largest beet and we are thinking it’s going to qualify,” Andrew Colace, owner of AMC Farms said.
“We hate to see beets like this come in,” Ron Tharp, Ag Manager for Spreckles Sugar joked. ” We have a size restriction on beets going up through the beet pump to the factory to our slicing station, and there is about a 20 inch opening. This beet will not go through that 20 inch opening,” he explained.
Sugar beets are grown to have their sugar extracted from them and turned into white sugar, molasse and cattle feed.
The average yield is 44 and a half tons of beets per acre. Tharp tells 13 on your side that that’s the highest in any sugar beet growing area in the world.
They produce close to 3 million, hundred pound bags of sugar every year from the 1.1 million tons of sugar beets grown.
Every year at Ojeda Industries, where AMC Farms buys their parts for digging sugar beets, they have a contest for the biggest beet. Colace says they are pretty confident this beet is a winner. The winning beet gets free lunches for all of the employees.
