The beet pulp pellet is admired not just for its alliterative qualities but also for its value as livestock feed.

The season don’t store as well as those that are gathered later, and those dug after the weather cools can be safely piled up and stored at receiving stations and processing sites. Thus, as October yielded to November and overnight temperatures in Minnesota and North Dakota dipped into the 20s and below, sugar beet farmers were out in all available hours to get their product out of the ground.

In a posting on the Southern Minnesota Sugar Beet Cooperative (SMBSC) web site, Corey Kreutzberg, harvest maintenance supervisor at the Crookston, Minn., factory, said, “It’s a wonderful crop this year, just huge, with good sugar content.”

A sugar beet, though not a particularly lovely specimen, is about 15 percent sugar. Refined sugar, liquid sugar, pulp pellets and molasses solubles are drawn from sugar beets. Those sugar forms in turn can yield:

• Baker’s sugar
• Granulated sugar
• Fruit sugar
• Liquid sucrose
• Beet pulp pellets
• Beet pulp shreds
• Beet molasses
• Raffinate (molasses without
  the sugar)

Three Midwest sugar companies use beets for three agri-products: beet pulp pellets, beet pulp shreds and molasses. These products are sold primarily for use in pet food manufacturing, as an enhancer in milk production, in bakers yeast manufacturing and feed-related applications.

The product most likely to be moved through the Port of Duluth-Superior is the beet pulp pellet, although molasses also makes an occasional appearance. (Don’t try this form of molasses on your pancakes. The Northern Crops Institute advises that beet molasses is too bitter for kitchen use but is valuable in the manufacture of yeast, chemicals and pharmaceuticals.)

Beet pulp, simply put, is the vegetable matter that remains after sugar is extracted from the beet. This vegetable matter is then mechanically pressed, dried to reduce its moisture content (approximately nine percent) and then turned into a five-sixteenths-inch pellet to capture its nutritional matter and improve its handling characteristics.

The beet pulp pellet is admired not just for its alliterative qualities but also for its value as livestock feed. The Southern Minnesota Co-op says that in growing and finishing diets, the pellet can replace corn silage or other forages. For stock cows, the pellet can fill energy requirements and stretch homegrown forage supplies. In dairy rations, the pellet improves the butter fat test.

The beet pulp pellet is a good source of protein and some essential minerals. Along with its nutrition, the pellet is high in fiber that is easily digestible, which makes it a good non-starch energy source.

A 1998 study by the University of Minnesota’s Northwest Experiment Station found that seven counties in North Dakota and 20 in Minnesota — collectively, more than 650,000 acres — produced nearly 12 million tons of sugar beets — nearly 45 percent of the entire nation’s crop. That work employed about 2,500 people full-time and supported thousands more in full-time-equivalent jobs in the two-state area.

In that same year — 1998 — 34,000 metric tons of beet pulp pellets were exported from Duluth. In 2006, that figure had grown to more than 81,000 short tons, and this year, to date, more than 125,000 short tons had been shipped out of Duluth-Superior.

That’s well short of the million-plus tons of durum and spring wheat that will move through the Twin Ports this season, but for the sugar beet growers of North Dakota and Minnesota, it’s still a pretty sweet story.