Ethanol, rotting in the fields

Beet harvester in October 2007 (photo: Grabe via Flickr.com)

October in Michigan doesn’t only represent mass consumption of sugar at Halloween; it’s sugar harvest time here, in the form of sugar beets.

Bet you didn’t know that half of our U.S. sugar supply comes from sugar beets. Yup — and Michigan is one of the top five U.S. states in production of sugar beets.

We’re going to have a record crop this year, between 20 to 25 percent larger than average. The warm but not too warm weather, combined with the right amount of autumn rain due in part to northern remnants of Hurricane Ike, provided optimum growth conditions. October is typically cool and damp in Michigan; the beet growers hope for periods of dry weather when it’s possible to harvest without being mired down in the muddy fields, but not so dry that the beets do not put on weight at the end of the season, or too warm, resulting in spoilage before processing.

But this year is different; there are so many beets that farmers are going to leave some of them in the fields to rot. We learned this over the past weekend during a casual chat with a chap who works closely with local farmers. He said that farmers can’t afford the fuel costs to harvest all the extra beets; the price of sugar is too low due to competitive pressure from federally subsidized corn syrup (as with all things corn), and any extra fuel expense would not be covered by revenues from additional sugar beet sales.

Beets are pulled from the ground — more literally lifted or squeezed from the field — before hard freeze sets in, then piled up in yards at the sugar processing plant. If left for too long, the beets will spoil. Since they can’t be processed fast enough, they’re going to go to waste, left to rot in the fields to be plowed under in the spring.

And since sugar is unprocessed ethanol, it means we are literally wasting a source of fuel for the lack of processing capability. It’s ethanol lost out there in the fields and an extra source of income lost to farmers.

There are other forms of biomass waste that could be turned into fuel; I’ve heard of excessive fruit crops that aren’t harvested, whether berries, stone fruits or apples, all of which could be used to generate alcohol for fuel. And with legislation aimed at balancing the amount of sugar coming into the country from overseas rather than encouraging use of excess production for ethanol, it’s hard to see how we will manage to migrate to energy self-sufficiency.

What a pity, since we may already produce quite a bit of the ethanol feedstock to meet our needs, and Michigan could obviously be a key player in ethanol production.