Sugar Beet Farming in the United States (NAICS 111991)

A Histometrics industry primer for public-market and private investors.

1. Overview

Sugar beet farming is the business of growing Beta vulgaris — a pale, cone-shaped root that is roughly 16–18% sucrose — as the raw feedstock for about 55–60% of all sugar produced in the United States (sugarcane supplies the rest).[1] It is a large, mechanized, irrigation- and Midwest-heavy field crop grown across 11 states, with a farm-gate crop value of roughly $2.7 billion in 2023 and $2.1 billion in 2022.[6] NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the federal scheme that defines this industry.[2]

The industry is best understood as a regional farm-to-factory system: growers plant under contract, deliver bulky roots to a nearby processor within days of harvest, and are paid on beet volume, sugar content, and the processor's sugar economics — not a fixed price at the scale.[1] The single most important structural fact for an investor is who owns that processor: U.S. beet-sugar processing is farmer-owned and cooperative.[3] The growers counted under code 111991 are, in almost every case, the members and owners of the cooperatives that slice, extract, and refine their beets into sugar. The farm and the factory are two links of one vertically integrated, grower-owned chain — and that shapes how money is made and who can invest.

Ways in:

• Public markets: there is no listed U.S. pure-play sugar-beet grower or beet processor; the majors are private cooperatives. Public exposure is indirect — the seed, crop-protection, fertilizer, and equipment firms that supply the crop; a sugar-price futures fund; or foreign-listed beet processors (Section 4).
• Private markets: ownership means buying farmland and, in practice, acquiring or being allocated cooperative "beet stock" (delivery rights) — a closed, relationship-driven market, not an open one — or lending into the farmland, equipment, storage, and processing infrastructure around it (Sections 4–5, 10).

The central question is not simply whether sugar prices rise. It is whether contracted acreage can be converted into recoverable sugar at attractive margins after weather losses, input costs, storage shrink, energy, labor, and financing.

2. What it is and how it's structured

Scope. NAICS 111991 covers farms primarily growing sugar beets. It stops at the farm gate. The value-added steps — turning beets into crystalline sugar, molasses, and pulp — sit in a separate industry, NAICS 311313, Beet Sugar Manufacturing.[2] Adjacent codes an investor should not confuse with this one:

• 111930 — Sugarcane Farming (the other sugar crop; cane vs. beet is the fundamental split in U.S. sugar).
• 111219 — Other Vegetable and Melon Farming (table/garden beets and related crops).
• 311313 — Beet Sugar Manufacturing (the cooperatives' factories).
• 311314 — Cane Sugar Manufacturing (raw and refined cane processing).

The industry excludes the beet-processing plants themselves and the upstream input, equipment, and logistics suppliers.[2]

Two ownership layers. (1) Family farms, partnerships, and other operators grow the crop; (2) grower-owned cooperatives commonly own the processing plants, storage, brands, and marketing relationships.[3] A grower typically must own cooperative shares (beet stock) that both entitle and obligate them to deliver a set acreage of beets to their local factory. The U.S. Beet Sugar Association reports the processing industry is farmer-owned and runs about 20 factories on beets grown across the 11 states.[3] This vertical integration gives growers a claim on the processor's residual profit, but it also requires cooperative capital, binding contract commitments, and specialized operating expertise. The result: the industry looks consolidated at the processing level while remaining thousands of independent farms at the growing level.

Where it's grown. Four regions: the Upper Midwest (Minnesota and North Dakota — the dominant Red River Valley), the Great Lakes (Michigan), the Great Plains (Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming), and the Far West (California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington).[1]

3. How big it is

Federal figures, most-authoritative first:

STRV = short tons, raw value, USDA's standard unit for sugar output. USDA's July 2026 outlook forecasts 2026/27 planted area falling to ~1.033 million acres, yield to ~31.9 tons per acre, beet production to ~32.3 million tons, and beet sugar to ~4.82 million STRV — down from the prior year on reduced acreage and yield.[5]

Note on our ground-truth data: the only figure in Histometrics' ingested federal dataset for this code is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) size standard of $2.5 million in average annual receipts, below which a beet farm counts as "small." That is a qualification threshold, not an estimate of industry revenue.[7] Every production, acreage, farm-count, and value figure above is drawn from USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) sources — NASS (National Agricultural Statistics Service) for the census and ERS (Economic Research Service) for the outlook — and cited individually.

The undercount caveat — read this carefully. Two things depress the "business" footprint of this industry in standard datasets:

1. Mechanical coverage gaps. The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns excludes crop production entirely, and its nonemployer statistics exclude NAICS sector 111 (farming). So USDA, not the Census Bureau's business programs, is the authoritative source here — this is a farm-coverage problem, not a government-dominated-industry one.[8]
2. Value realized downstream. The ~$2–3 billion farm-gate figure understates the true economic footprint, because growers own the processing cooperatives. Most of the value — refining, marketing, byproducts, and the margin over the world sugar price that U.S. policy protects — is realized one step downstream in NAICS 311313, not captured in farm-level crop value. The beet grower and the beet-sugar manufacturer are, financially, the same people.

State-level scale (2022 harvested acres): Minnesota and North Dakota's Red River Valley dominates, with Idaho, Michigan, and the Great Plains states making up most of the balance.[4]

4. The investable universe

There is no listed U.S. pure-play. The companies that grow and process sugar beets are private, grower-owned cooperatives; they have no tickers, and their "shares" are cooperative delivery rights traded among farmers, not securities. Public-market exposure is therefore a set of proxies, each imperfect.

Public routes (all indirect):

OTC = over-the-counter; NYSE / TSX = New York / Toronto Stock Exchanges; ICE = Intercontinental Exchange (No. 11 is its world raw-sugar contract). KWS and Bayer jointly developed the Roundup Ready sugar-beet system used across North America; Bayer says it owns the trait technology but does not itself commercialize the seed.[16] Also adjacent, not exposure: Südzucker AG (SZU, Xetra), Europe's largest beet-sugar processor — but EU policy and currency, not U.S. dynamics; and diversified sweetener names like Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM, NYSE) and Ingredion (INGR, NYSE), whose sugar is mostly corn-based high-fructose corn syrup, not beet.

Private routes — the major cooperatives (the real operators):

Marketing is further consolidated: United Sugars Corporation — a marketing cooperative of American Crystal, Minn-Dak, Southern Minnesota, and others — supplies roughly a quarter of total U.S. sugar demand and controls how members' sugar reaches industrial and retail buyers.[14]

5. How the money works

Think in three layers, because a beet grower earns across all of them.

1. The beet payment (the farm's real revenue). Growers are not paid a fixed price at delivery. They deliver beets to their cooperative and later receive a net beet payment — the factory's sugar-sales revenue, minus processing and operating costs, divided across members by tons delivered and sugar content. So the grower's income is the processor's profit. Unit economics turn on (a) tons of beets per acre, (b) sugar content (percent sucrose) per ton, and (c) the net revenue the cooperative earns per pound of sugar sold.

• American Crystal announced an expected net payment of ~$84.67 per ton for its 2023 crop — a record.[20]
• Regional benchmark prices (the FINBIN farm database) ran near ~$81/ton in 2023 and ~$73/ton in 2024, with 2025 payments expected lower as sugar prices fell.[21]

2. Cost and breakeven. Beets are a high-cost, high-value, input-intensive crop. Full cost of production (direct plus overhead) approached ~$1,600 per acre on sampled Upper-Midwest farms in 2025.[21] Analysts put the breakeven beet price in the mid-$50s per ton at recent yields — so the gap between an ~$85 record year and a mid-$50s breakeven is the whole story of grower profitability and cyclicality.[21] The equipment is specialized and can sit idle outside the beet campaign, so returns also depend on machinery utilization across rotation crops, farm scale, and access to labor and financing.

3. Byproducts and downstream margin. Every ton of beets also yields beet pulp (a valued livestock feed), molasses, and betaine — extra revenue lines that flow back into the member payment. Because members own the factory, they capture refining and byproduct margin an independent farmer selling into an open market would not.

Processor economics (which flow straight into the payment): contracted acreage and tons delivered, factory throughput and campaign utilization, sugar recovery from sliced beets, storage shrink and quality loss (beets deteriorate in the pile, so temperature, humidity, disease, and mechanical damage cut recoverable sugar), energy/labor/maintenance costs, refined-sugar prices, and marketing allocations.[1] For private underwriting, per-acre cash margin, debt-service coverage, water security, contract terms, and equipment replacement matter more than a generic agricultural revenue multiple; for a processor, throughput, recovery, shrink, maintenance capex, and leverage tell you more than farm-level yield alone.

Metrics to watch, in order: recoverable sugar per acre, net beet payment per ton, cost per acre, and the wholesale refined-beet sugar price that ultimately funds the payment.

6. What drives demand

• U.S. sugar consumption, slowly declining. Per-capita caloric-sweetener consumption is around 121 pounds in 2025 and trending down ~1% a year.[28] The most-watched headwind is GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists such as semaglutide): with roughly one in five U.S. households now including a GLP-1 user, USDA attributes part of a projected multi-year low in sugar deliveries to changed eating habits, alongside reformulation toward stevia, monk fruit, and allulose.[28] This is a genuine structural demand question, not a passing dip.
• Industrial vs. retail mix. Most beet sugar goes to food and beverage manufacturers (bakery, confectionery, cereal, dairy), so demand tracks packaged-food volumes more than the sugar bowl.[1]
• Substitution. Domestic beet sugar competes with cane sugar and, in many industrial uses, with corn-based high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and non-caloric sweeteners; relative prices shift share among them.[1]
• Supply-side swings. Beet acreage and farm profitability can move sharply even when sugar demand is stable — driven by weather at planting/harvest, sucrose content, disease and pest pressure, seed genetics, western irrigation availability, and the relative returns from corn, soybeans, and wheat that compete for the same rotation acres.
• Policy-set price. Uniquely, a large share of the economics is administered: U.S. sugar prices are supported well above world levels by federal supply management (Section 7), so grower revenue depends more on the domestic price the program engineers than on global sugar demand.

7. Regulation

Sugar is one of the most heavily managed commodities in U.S. agriculture. The U.S. Sugar Program, authorized in the Farm Bill and administered by USDA's Farm Service Agency (FSA), uses four levers:[22][23]

1. Nonrecourse price-support loans. The USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) lends to processors (the cooperatives), not growers, against sugar at set loan rates for up to nine months; if prices fall below the rate, a processor can satisfy the loan by forfeiting the pledged sugar to the government instead of repaying — effectively a price floor. FY2026 rates are 24.00¢/lb for raw cane sugar and 32.77¢/lb for refined beet sugar, the latter raised by 2025 legislation.[22] Processors taking CCC loans must meet minimum grower-payment requirements set in the grower-processor contract.[22]
2. Marketing allotments. USDA caps how much domestic sugar processors may sell, splitting the total ~54.35% to beet sugar and ~45.65% to cane — supply management that keeps the floor from being tested.[23]
3. Tariff-rate quotas (TRQs). Imports are limited: a set tonnage enters at low/zero duty, and anything above faces a high tariff — keeping cheaper world sugar out.[23]
4. Feedstock Flexibility Program. A backstop letting USDA buy surplus sugar and resell it to ethanol producers to avoid loan forfeitures (not triggered for FY2026).[22]

The program is designed to run "at no cost to taxpayers" when it works — the cost is borne by U.S. sugar buyers (and ultimately consumers) paying above-world prices, which is why it is perennially attacked by food manufacturers and defended by growers.[23]

Other rules that matter to owners:

• Antitrust. The Capper-Volstead Act (1922) gives qualified farmer cooperatives a limited exemption from federal antitrust law for collective marketing — the legal foundation of the grower-owned cooperative model.[24]
• Crop insurance. Federal multi-peril insurance is administered through the USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA) under sugar-beet-specific crop provisions.[25]
• Biotechnology. Genetically engineered crops are overseen by USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).[26] Essentially the entire U.S. beet crop — ~95%+ since 2008–2010 — is planted to Roundup Ready (glyphosate-tolerant) GMO seed, which cleared a contentious USDA deregulation fight; this lowers weeding cost but ties the crop to glyphosate availability, herbicide-resistance risk, and GMO-labeling politics.[29]
• Pesticides. Registration and use are governed by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), enforced by the EPA.[27]
• Trade. Imports from Mexico run under suspension agreements, and in 2026 U.S. lawmakers pressed for a Section 301 investigation into alleged unfair foreign sugar-trade practices — a live trade-policy risk and opportunity.[30]

Policy supports domestic grower economics but creates political, trade, and antitrust risk: a change in import quotas, tariffs, loan rates, or cooperative treatment would ripple through the entire value chain.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The competitive advantages here are local and structural: sunk investment in factories, storage, rail, and energy; limited geographic growing regions; long-term grower contracts and acreage commitments; high transport costs for bulky roots; specialized processing knowledge; and cooperative ownership with local political relationships. A processor is often the only practical buyer for growers within its processing radius — which would confer bargaining power, except that grower ownership hands farmers governance and a claim on residual profit.

The defining trend is fewer farms and fewer factories producing more sugar. USDA ERS data show sugar beet farms falling from 3,913 in 2012 to 3,496 in 2017, even as average harvested area per farm rose (~319 to ~329 acres); the 2022 census counted 3,257 farms.[1][4] Consolidation is not only acquisitions — cooperative ownership, plant upgrades, joint marketing, and contract reallocation produce similar effects.

The clearest recent example: American Crystal shut its Sidney, Montana ("Sidney Sugars") factory in 2023, after contracted acreage in that district fell from ~45,000 acres in the 1990s to ~18,000 by 2022 — stranding local growers who had to switch crops.[31] It illustrates the model's fragility at the margin: because a beet must reach a nearby factory quickly, a district's growers and their single processor are mutually dependent, and neither can easily exit. Competition, therefore, is less firm-vs-firm and more region-vs-region (which growing areas stay viable) and beet-vs-cane-vs-corn for share of the protected U.S. sweetener market. Investors should ask whether added scale is delivering better recovery and lower unit cost — or merely stacking fixed capital.

9. Risks

• Price/margin cyclicality. Record 2023 payments (~$85/ton) gave way to a 2024–2026 downcycle: heavy supplies and soft demand pushed refined-beet spot prices from the low-40s to as low as ~35.75¢/lb in mid-2025, squeezing payments toward breakeven.[21]
• Structural demand erosion. GLP-1 adoption and sugar-reduction reformulation threaten a slow, secular decline in U.S. sugar volume — arguably the industry's biggest long-term question.[28]
• Weather and agronomic risk. Beets are exposed to drought, hail, early freezes (the 2019/20 freeze cut output sharply), and diseases like Cercospora leaf spot; USDA's July 2026 outlook already projects lower 2026/27 acreage, yield, and beet sugar output.[5]
• Cost inflation. Fertilizer, fuel, seed, and irrigation drove cost of production to record highs (~$1,600/acre), compressing margins when prices fall.[21]
• Storage and processing losses. Shrink, rot, impurities, factory outages, or transport failures cut recoverable sugar even after a good harvest.[1]
• Policy and trade dependence. Grower economics rest on the program's floor and import limits; any liberalization, trade-deal concession, or loss of political support would hit domestic prices directly.[22][23]
• Water and environmental rules. Western production is especially exposed to irrigation availability and water regulation.
• Concentration and factory risk. With only ~20 factories, a single closure can end beet farming in a whole district, as Sidney showed.[31]
• Private-market opacity and illiquidity. Cooperative financials, member-capital accounts, contract terms, and patronage economics are hard for outsiders to evaluate; beet stock is not freely tradable, capital is locked in farmland and delivery rights, and exit depends on the local co-op's health.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (all indirect). Because there is no listed U.S. beet farmer or processor, public investors buy proxies, each imperfect:

• KWS or Bayer for the most direct technology exposure (seed, traits, crop protection).[15][16]
• Deere for farm-equipment-cycle exposure; Nutrien for fertilizer and ag-retail exposure.[17][18]
• CANE (Teucrium Sugar Fund) for the world sugar price via futures — a weak proxy for U.S. beet economics, which policy holds above and less volatile than the world market.[19]
• Foreign beet processors (Südzucker) or diversified sweetener names (ADM, Ingredion) for operating adjacency, with EU/currency or corn-weighted caveats.

None should be valued as a beet pure-play: their share price, dividend yield, and valuation multiple describe a diversified parent, not the U.S. beet exposure.

Private routes (the real ownership path). Direct participation means owning beet-growing farmland and the associated cooperative beet stock that carries delivery rights to a local factory — a closed, relationship-driven market where due diligence centers on the local factory's viability, the district's agronomics, and the co-op's balance sheet as much as the land. Adjacent ways to deploy capital: contracted grower operations, equipment leasing and farm finance, cooperative or processor private credit, and irrigation, storage, hauling, and ag-technology infrastructure. Farmland funds offer a lighter-touch way to hold beet ground without operating it.

Near-term drivers to watch. (1) Whether the 2024–2026 price downcycle bottoms as supply adjusts — USDA's July 2026 outlook projects lower 2026/27 beet output, which could tighten balances but does not guarantee higher grower profits while input and fixed costs stay high;[5] (2) the trajectory of GLP-1-driven demand erosion, the key structural unknown;[28] (3) trade policy, including any Section 301 action and the durability of import limits;[30] and (4) the sugar program's fate in Farm Bill politics, since the loan-rate floor and allotments underpin every grower's payment.[22][23]

Base-case judgment. U.S. sugar beet farming is a mature, policy-protected, regionally concentrated commodity industry with stable-to-slowly-declining demand — attractive for downside protection and farmland income, but with little organic growth and no clean way for a public investor to own the thing itself. The best returns are likelier to come from operational efficiency — better seed and crop protection, improved storage and recovery, water security, and disciplined private ownership — than from broad market growth.

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Sources

1. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners — Background" (beet ~55–60% of U.S. sugar; growing regions; substitutes; farm-consolidation data), 2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/background
2. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Search — 111991 Sugar Beet Farming" (scope; excluded adjacent codes), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/
3. U.S. Beet Sugar Association, "About Us" (farmer-owned processing; ~20 factories; 11 states; cooperatives including Southern Minnesota and Wyoming Sugar), 2026. https://beetsugar.org/about/
4. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, "2022 Census of Agriculture — State Summary Highlights" (3,257 farms; 1,157,599 harvested acres; 32,945,247 tons; 1,129 irrigated farms / 353,406 irrigated acres), 2024. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/
5. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners Outlook," July 2026 (2025/26 and 2026/27 planted/harvested acreage, yield, beet production, beet sugar STRV). https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/29364/sss-m-455.pdf
6. USDA NASS, "Crop Values Summary" (via Statista, "Sugarbeet production value in the U.S."), farm-gate value 2022 ≈ $2.1B, 2023 ≈ $2.7B, 2025. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191927/sugarbeet-production-value-in-the-us-from-2000/
7. U.S. Small Business Administration, "Table of Small Business Size Standards" (NAICS 111991 = $2.5 million average annual receipts) — Histometrics ground-truth stat, 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
8. U.S. Census Bureau, "County Business Patterns — Methodology / Coverage" (crop production and NAICS 111 excluded from CBP and nonemployer statistics), 2026. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
9. American Crystal Sugar Company, "About Our Cooperative / History" (largest, oldest grower-owned beet co-op; grower-owned since 1973; ~2,500 growers; Red River Valley; United Sugars), 2026. https://www.crystalsugar.com/about-our-cooperative/
10. Amalgamated Sugar Company / Snake River Sugar Co., "Our Story" (grower cooperative; White Satin brand; National Sugar Marketing), 2026. https://www.amalgamatedsugar.com/our-story/
11. Michigan Sugar Company, "About Us" (grower-owned; Pioneer / Big Chief brands; four Michigan factories), 2025. https://www.michigansugar.com/about-us/
12. Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative, "About Us" (grower-owned; southern Red River Valley), 2026. https://www.mdf.coop/about
13. Western Sugar Cooperative, "Who We Are / Our Growers" (four factories across NE, CO, WY, MT), 2026. https://www.westernsugar.com/who-we-are/our-growers/
14. United Sugars Corporation, "Who We Are / Our Members" (marketing cooperative; ~one-quarter of U.S. sugar demand), 2026. https://unitedsugarpr.com/who-we-are/our-members/
15. KWS SAAT SE, "KWS Share / Investors" (sugar-beet seed breeder; Frankfurt listing), 2026. https://www.kws.com/corp/en/investors/
16. Bayer, "New Shared Opportunities in Sugarbeet" and "Investors — Shareholder Information" (Roundup Ready beet trait; licenses to third parties; BAYN / BAYRY), 2021–2026. https://www.seedgrowth.bayer.com/en-us/news-stories/new-shared-opportunities-in-sugar-beet.html
17. Deere & Company, "Investor Resources" (farm machinery, precision ag, equipment finance; NYSE: DE), 2026. https://investor.deere.com/
18. Nutrien Ltd., "Investors — Shareholder Information" (fertilizer, crop protection, ag retail; NYSE / TSX: NTR), 2026. https://www.nutrien.com/investors/
19. Teucrium Commodity Trust, "Teucrium Sugar Fund (CANE)" (ICE world raw-sugar No. 11 futures ETF; NYSE Arca), 2025. https://www.teucrium.com/
20. Agweek, "American Crystal Sugar expects to make record payments to growers" (net ~$84.67/ton, 2023 crop), 2024. https://www.agweek.com/news/sugarbeet/american-crystal-sugar-expects-to-make-record-payments-to-growers
21. Terrain (American AgCredit / Farm Credit), "Big Supplies, Slowing Demand Roil Sugar Prices, Margins" (FINBIN ~$81/ton 2023, ~$73/ton 2024; breakeven mid-$50s; ~$1,600/acre; refined-beet spot ~35.75¢/lb mid-2025), 2025. https://www.terrainag.com/insights/big-supplies-slowing-demand-roil-sugar-prices-margins/
22. USDA Farm Service Agency, "USDA Announces Fiscal Year 2026 Sugar Loan Rates and No Actions Under Feedstock Flexibility Program" (raw cane 24.00¢/lb, refined beet 32.77¢/lb; CCC processor loans; grower-payment requirement; Feedstock Flexibility), Sept 26, 2025. https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/09-26-2025/usda-announces-fiscal-year-2026-sugar-loan-rates-no-actions-feedstock
23. Congressional Research Service and USDA ERS, "U.S. Sugar Program — Policy" (marketing allotments ~54.35% beet / ~45.65% cane; TRQs; no-net-cost design), 2024–2025. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/policy
24. U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, "National Council of Farmer Cooperatives" (Capper-Volstead Act limited antitrust exemption for farmer cooperatives), 2010. https://www.justice.gov/atr/national-council-farmer-cooperatives-general
25. USDA Risk Management Agency, "Sugar Beet Crop Provisions" (federal crop insurance), 2025. https://www.rma.usda.gov/
26. USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, "Biotechnology Regulations" (APHIS/EPA/FDA oversight of genetically engineered crops), 2025. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/regulations
27. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "About Pesticide Registration" (FIFRA), 2025. https://www.epa.gov/pesticide-registration/about-pesticide-registration
28. Food Business News, "Sugar reduction and GLP-1s," with Expana / IBISWorld data (per-capita sweetener use ~121 lbs, ~-1%/yr; ~1 in 5 households a GLP-1 user), 2025–2026. https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/27877-sugar-reduction-and-glp-1s
29. Wikipedia, "Genetically modified sugar beet," and PMC (National Library of Medicine), "A Scientific and Legal Look at Herbicide-Tolerant Sugar Beet" (~95%+ Roundup Ready adoption by 2010), 2010–2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_sugar_beet
30. U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin, "Slotkin, Hoeven Press Ambassador Greer to Investigate Unfair, Predatory Sugar Trade Practices" (call for Section 301 investigation), May 21, 2026. https://www.slotkin.senate.gov/2026/05/21/slotkin-hoeven-press-ambassador-greer-to-investigate-unfair-predatory-sugar-trade-practices/
31. Billings Gazette / Agweek, "American Crystal pulls plug on Sidney sugar beet factory" (2023 closure; contracted acreage fell ~45,000 to ~18,000), 2023. https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-regional/american-crystal-pulls-plug-on-sidney-sugar-beet-factory/article_4622bf7a-a663-11ed-8b7b-c3eae33046cb.html