Beet Sugar Manufacturing in the United States (NAICS 311313)

1. Overview

Beet sugar manufacturing turns a cold-climate root crop, the sugar beet, into the same refined white sugar (sucrose) sold in grocery bags and shipped to food and beverage makers. It is one of two ways the United States makes sugar; the other is cane. Beets supply the larger share: about 56% of U.S. sugar production comes from beets and 44% from cane [1].

For an investor, the striking feature of this industry is who owns it. Nearly every U.S. beet sugar factory is a grower-owned cooperative — the farmers who raise the beets also own the processing plants and split the profits [2][3]. There is essentially no publicly traded, pure-play U.S. beet sugar company. That makes it an unusual case: a multi-billion-dollar, federally protected industry with almost no direct stock-market access. Public-market investors reach it only indirectly (equipment, seed traits, sweetener rivals, sugar-buying food companies); the direct ownership route is private — cooperative "beet stock," farmland in beet country, or supplying the mills [4].

A beet plant is an integrated factory, not the equivalent of a cane mill that produces raw sugar for later refining. Harvested roots are weighed and tested, stored in ventilated piles, washed, sliced into thin strips, and passed through hot-water diffusers. The extracted juice is purified, filtered, concentrated by evaporation, crystallized, centrifuged, dried, and shipped as granulated, powdered, liquid, or specialty sugar [5]. Beets are bulky, expensive to haul, and begin losing sucrose after harvest, so factories sit inside their growing territories and contract with nearby growers. Cold northern winters permit longer storage and campaigns; warmer regions have shorter processing windows. This perishability and asset specificity explain why growers vertically integrated into factory ownership [6].

2. What it is and how it's structured

NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 311313 covers establishments that process sugar beets into raw and refined sugar and the byproducts of that process [7]. Because beet processing goes straight from root to finished refined sugar in one integrated campaign, these plants are both "mills" and "refineries."

What the code excludes is important:

• Sugar beet farming is a separate code, NAICS 111991 (sugar beet farming) — the field side is not counted here, even though the same farmers own the factories [7].
• Cane sugar manufacturing — raw cane milling and cane refining — sits in NAICS 311314 [7].
• Nonchocolate confectionery, corn sweeteners (high-fructose corn syrup, glucose, dextrose), and starches made from corn wet-milling fall under other food-manufacturing codes (e.g., 311221), not here [7].

Ownership mix: overwhelmingly agricultural cooperatives owned by their beet growers. The U.S. Beet Sugar Association reports seven manufacturers operating 19 factories in 10 states, with the entire processing industry farmer-owned and every factory operating with organized union labor [8]. The major names — American Crystal Sugar, The Amalgamated Sugar Company, Western Sugar Cooperative, Michigan Sugar Company, Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative, Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative, and Wyoming Sugar Company — are all farmer-owned [2][3][8][9]. Roughly 10,000 growers across about 11 states raise beets on ~1.1 million acres and collectively own the factories [2].

3. How big it is

Federal statistics for NAICS 311313 (U.S. Census Bureau) put hard numbers on the manufacturing side:

Production volume. USDA's beet balance sheet provides a more current production measure. U.S. beet-sugar production was 5.370 million short tons, raw value (STRV), in final FY2024/25, is estimated at 4.996 million STRV in FY2025/26, and is forecast at 4.821 million STRV in FY2026/27, the lowest since FY2019/20. Forecast planted area of 1.033 million acres would be the lowest in more than 45 years [12]. USDA valued the 2024 U.S. sugar-beet crop at $2.449 billion, with an average grower price of $69.40 per ton, down from $2.748 billion and $76.60 per ton in 2023 [13].

Undercount / scope caveat. These figures measure only the factories, not the whole beet-sugar economy. The field side (growing) is in a different code, and the industry's own tallies — which bundle farming, processing and downstream logistics — are far larger: roughly 10,000 farm families, ~20 operating factories and, by industry estimate, more than 100,000 jobs and over $13 billion in annual economic activity across the beet supply chain [2]. So the ~7,050 manufacturing employees understate the industry's true footprint; conversely, the industry-advocacy jobs figure is a supply-chain number, not a factory headcount. The Census count of 12 firms and 29 establishments is not inconsistent with seven current processors and 19 factories: Census establishments can include packaging, warehousing, and related employer locations, its observation year was 2022, and corporate/legal entities do not necessarily match USDA allocation holders. For the value of what the factories actually make, the $4.360 billion receipts figure is the cleanest measure [10].

4. The investable universe

There are no U.S.-listed pure-play beet sugar stocks. The producers are cooperatives whose shares transfer only among qualifying growers. The table below is therefore mostly private/cooperative owners, with public and indirect routes noted afterward.

On USDA's FY2026 marketing allocations, the top two processors (American Crystal and Amalgamated) controlled 60.0% of beet allocations, against a total beet allotment of 5.525 million STRV [14]. A 2024 USITC staff briefing found that the five largest processors received 85.6% of FY2023 beet allocations, while plants in the four principal states represented about 82.5% of processing capacity [17].

Closest public proxy: Germany's Südzucker AG (ticker SZU) is a listed European beet processor, but it is majority-controlled (~63%) by a grower cooperative and trades on U.S. investors' overseas access, not domestic beet sugar [18].

Cooperative "beet stock" (the private route): each American Crystal share carries the right and obligation to plant roughly one acre of beets and deliver them to the co-op. American Crystal historically restricted shares to farm operators, required acreage in proportion to preferred shares, and has only a limited private market subject to board approval [19]. That stock trades privately among growers; recent sales have been in the $5,500–$6,000 per share range, and season-end payments to shareholders track the co-op's total profit and sugar produced, not just tons delivered [4][20]. Western Sugar is similarly a closed cooperative in which one preferred share permits and obligates the holder to raise one acre of beets; shares are purchased from existing shareholders [21]. This is the most direct ownership stake available, but it is effectively restricted to people farming qualifying acreage.

5. How the money works

Owner economics here are a commodity-processing story layered on federal price support, so several drivers matter at once:

• Extraction and sugar content. Revenue per acre depends on beet tonnage times sucrose content times the recovery the factory achieves. Higher-sugar beets and lower processing losses are the core efficiency lever. USDA's current production bridge illustrates the sensitivity: for FY2025/26, 35.140 million tons of beets are estimated to yield 31.915 million tons sliced after 9.18% shrink; an extraction rate of 14.58% produces 4.653 million STRV from sliced beets, supplemented by 366,000 STRV from molasses [12].
• The "campaign." Beets can't be stored long, so factories run a continuous "campaign" from harvest (fall) through spring, pushing capacity utilization near 100% while beets last. Idle capacity outside the campaign and the cost of piling/storing beets are fixed drags. Warm storage weather can thaw frozen piles, accelerate respiration and microbial deterioration, and reduce recoverable sucrose after the farming cost has already been incurred. Energy — mostly natural gas to boil off water and crystallize sugar — is the largest variable cost, so gas prices swing margins [22].
• Co-products. Nothing is wasted. Beet pulp and molasses are sold as animal feed, and molasses can be further processed to recover betaine and other specialty products — a meaningful secondary revenue stream [22].
• The support price. U.S. sugar sells well above the world price because of the federal sugar program (Section 7). For FY2026, the national average loan rate was increased to 32.77 cents per pound of refined beet sugar, with regional rates ranging from 32.56 to 33.66 cents (up from 25.38 cents in FY2025) [23]. Marketing allotments cap how much each processor can sell domestically, and import quotas keep foreign sugar out. Together these hold the domestic price up and, in most years, cost the Treasury essentially nothing. GAO found that in 2022 U.S. wholesale refined beet sugar averaged 52.3 cents per pound, versus a 24.2-cent world refined price, while cautioning that freight and the effect of U.S. demand on world prices prevent a simple one-for-one comparison [24][25][26].
• The cooperative payout. Because growers own the mills, "profit" flows back as beet payments per ton delivered, plus dividends on stock. Cooperative economics make conventional margins misleading — net proceeds after processing and marketing costs are largely returned through beet payments and patronage rather than retained as ordinary corporate profit. American Crystal's 2024 crop generated a $78.00-per-ton net beet payment, but its record-volume 2025 crop was forecast to return only $43.85 per ton amid weaker pricing and import pressure [27]. That 44% decline is a better indication of economic volatility than a processor "margin" stripped of grower returns.

The current pressure point: U.S. sugar prices fell from ~53–55 cents/lb in early 2024 toward the mid-30s cents/lb by late 2025 on record supply and softening demand, while the cost to grow an acre of beets pushed toward a record ~$1,600 [28]. Falling price plus rising cost is the classic cooperative margin squeeze, and it is what forced factory closures (Section 8).

6. What drives demand

• Food and beverage volume. Most beet sugar goes to industrial buyers — bakers, confectioners, soft-drink and packaged-food makers — so demand tracks caloric-sweetener consumption. USDA currently reports total U.S. food-and-beverage sugar deliveries (including beet, cane, and direct imports) of 12.375 million STRV in FY2024/25 and estimates 12.441 million STRV in FY2025/26 and FY2026/27 [12]. In May 2026, USDA cited changing eating habits, revised food-consumption recommendations, inflation, and rising adoption of GLP-1 drugs when projecting total food-and-beverage sugar use down 0.7% year over year [29].
• Sugar vs. high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Beet sugar competes head-to-head with HFCS. The secular picture is mixed: total caloric-sweetener availability fell from 153.6 pounds per person in 1999 to 123.5 pounds in 2023, but refined cane-and-beet sugar recovered to 68.4 pounds per person in 2023 as high-fructose corn syrup lost share [30]. A notable 2025 shift: pushed by the administration and the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) agenda, Coca-Cola launched a U.S. cane-sugar version of Coke, and several brands have moved from HFCS back toward real sugar [31]. Beet sugar benefits when manufacturers reformulate from HFCS toward "real sugar," even while reduced-sugar diets, noncaloric sweeteners, smaller portions, and health policy constrain the overall sweetener pool.
• Beet-vs-cane substitution. For most industrial uses refined beet and cane sugar are chemically identical (the same sucrose molecule) and interchangeable; a small but persistent slice of buyers (and some "cane sugar" marketing claims) prefers cane, which caps beet's reach at the premium end. Most 2025 reformulation demand has flowed to cane, and whether beet benefits depends on buyer preference and labeling [1][31].
• Livestock feed. Demand for beet pulp/molasses co-products rises and falls with cattle and dairy economics [22].

7. Regulation

This is one of the most heavily managed of U.S. agricultural industries, and policy is central to the investment case.

• The U.S. Sugar Program (administered by USDA's Farm Service Agency, authorized in the farm bill) sets the whole frame: nonrecourse commodity loans to processors at the loan rates above (a de facto floor), overall and per-company marketing allotments dividing the U.S. market between beet (~54.35%) and cane (~45.65%), and tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) that admit a set tonnage of imports at low duty and tax anything above it heavily. The overall domestic allotment must be at least 85% of estimated human-use deliveries. A Feedstock Flexibility Program can divert surplus sugar to ethanol to prevent loan forfeitures [23][24][25][26].
• Trade. Imports are held down by TRQs and by the long-running Suspension Agreements on sugar from Mexico, which cap and price Mexican shipments; U.S. authorities voted in 2025 to continue them [32]. Producers have also pressed for a Section 301 trade investigation into foreign sugar practices [33].
• Biotech and pesticides. USDA reported genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant varieties on 98% of sugar-beet acreage by 2013 (its last beet-specific estimate), making beets one of the most widely adopted biotech crops [34]. Newer dicamba-tolerant traits are advancing, drawing scrutiny over herbicide drift onto neighboring crops [35]. However, USDA's bioengineered disclosure standard turns on detectable modified genetic material; highly refined sugar shown to contain none does not require mandatory bioengineered disclosure [36]. EPA pesticide rulings and USDA/FDA biotech deregulation directly affect grower costs and yields.
• Environmental and labor. Water rights (especially in the arid West), air permits on gas-fired boilers, and seasonal factory labor are recurring compliance areas. BLS reported a 2024 total-recordable injury and illness rate of 6.8 cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers in beet sugar manufacturing, including 4.6 cases involving days away, restriction, or transfer, versus 4.9 total cases for sugar manufacturing overall [37].

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The industry is concentrated and consolidating. Federal data show the top four firms account for 78.6% of shipments, the top eight for 99%, with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) of about 2,075 — a "highly concentrated" reading [10]. USITC analysis likewise finds four firms dominate beet processing and counted 23 plant closures since 1981 [17].

Consolidation is accelerating because scale and price support both favor the biggest, lowest-cost co-ops. Over the past decade roughly 14% of U.S. beet sugar factories have closed, and 2025 brought the symbolic end of beet farming in California: Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative's Spreckels plant in Brawley — the last in the state — shut down after nearly 80 years, despite ~$100 million of investment, citing years of deteriorating sugar-industry economics [15][38][39]. Marketing has consolidated too: United Sugars Corporation pools the output of several co-ops and moves roughly a quarter of U.S. sugar [16]. The direction of travel is fewer, larger factories in the lowest-cost regions (Red River Valley, Idaho).

9. Risks

• Price/cost squeeze (cyclical). As 2024–2025 showed, falling sugar prices against rising input costs can wipe out margins and force closures. American Crystal's 44% decline in beet payment per ton illustrates the severity [27][28][38].
• Policy risk. The entire profit model rests on the federal sugar program. Any farm-bill change to loan rates, allotments or import quotas — or trade liberalization — would directly hit prices. Sweetener users lobby persistently to loosen the program. Conversely, visibly high U.S. prices create political opposition from food manufacturers and encourage reformulation or imports of sugar-containing finished products [26].
• Demand erosion. Long-run per-capita sugar consumption is soft as consumers cut added sugar; a durable shift to non-caloric sweeteners would shrink the market. Rising adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs has been cited by USDA as a demand headwind [1][29].
• Substitution to cane. "Real cane sugar" marketing and reformulation (e.g., cane-sugar Coke) may route incremental demand to cane rather than beet [31].
• Weather and biology. Beets are exposed to drought, early freezes, disease (e.g., Cercospora, rhizomania) and water-allocation cuts in the West. Storage adds a second weather exposure after harvest: warm spells can thaw frozen piles, accelerate deterioration, and destroy recoverable sucrose after the farming cost is sunk.
• Biotech/pesticide backlash. Reliance on glyphosate- and dicamba-tolerant seed exposes growers to regulatory reversals and drift litigation [35].
• Capital intensity and stranded assets. Factories are expensive to maintain and hard to repurpose; a closing plant strands both the factory and the surrounding growers' beet stock (the Brawley playbook). A prolonged outage during the campaign cannot always be recovered because beets deteriorate and cannot economically travel long distances to another plant. Shrinking regional acreage can strand the factory, while a factory closure can eliminate the crop's local market [38].
• Labor. The industry is organized and the campaign requires continuous staffing. Safety performance, union negotiations, skilled maintenance availability, and seasonal recruitment have financial consequences [37].

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes (all indirect). There is no listed U.S. beet sugar company. Public investors gain exposure sideways:

• Sweetener rivals/adjacencies — corn-sweetener and ingredient makers such as Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM) and Ingredion (INGR); note they are largely on the HFCS/corn side, i.e., partly competitors to beet sugar.
• Seed and input suppliers — Bayer (BAYRY) and Corteva (CTVA) for beet seed and biotech traits; Deere (DE) and Nutrien (NTR) for equipment and fertilizer.
• Sugar buyers — packaged-food and confectionery companies (e.g., Hershey (HSY), Mondelez (MDLZ)) benefit when domestic sugar is cheap, giving inverse exposure to producer margins.
• Agricultural equipment — Art's-Way Manufacturing (ARTW) sells beet harvesting equipment; the company disclosed that American Crystal's 44% decline in beet payment per ton weakened early orders for beet equipment, though it does not disclose beet-specific revenue and is not a pure play [40].
• Overseas pure-play — Südzucker AG (SZU) for listed beet-processing exposure, albeit European and cooperative-controlled [18].
• Commodity funds — sugar ETFs/ETNs (e.g., Teucrium's CANE) track the world raw (cane) No. 11 price, which is protected-price-insulated from and can diverge sharply from U.S. beet economics, so they are a poor proxy.

Private routes (the direct ones).

• Cooperative beet stock — the only true ownership of a U.S. beet processor, but practically limited to those farming qualifying acreage; shares recently traded ~$5,500–$6,000 and pay out on the co-op's profit and sugar produced [4][19][20][21].
• Farmland in beet regions, whose value is tied to beet-stock and payment economics. Farmland alone does not guarantee access to a processor; diligence is required on the attached delivery contract, cooperative balance sheet, factory territory, irrigation rights, and share-transfer rules.
• Supplying the mills — energy, equipment, logistics and specialty co-product (betaine) offtake.

Outlook (forward-looking). The near-term picture is cautious: record 2024/25–2025/26 supply and soft demand have pressed U.S. sugar prices to multi-year lows just as growing costs hit records, squeezing cooperative payouts and driving marginal-factory closures [1][27][28][38]. USDA forecasts beet-sugar production at 4.821 million STRV in FY2026/27, the lowest since FY2019/20, with planted acreage at a 45-year low [12]. Consolidation into the lowest-cost regions is likely to continue. The clearest potential upside is a demand mix shift back toward real sugar under the MAHA/anti-HFCS push — but so far that has mostly favored cane, and any beet benefit is speculative [31]. The steadiest support remains structural: the federal sugar program keeps domestic prices well above world levels, so unless farm-bill or trade policy changes, beet sugar stays a protected, concentrated, cooperative-owned industry — profitable in normal years, painful at the bottom of the price cycle, and largely closed to public equity.

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Sources

1. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners Outlook" (Sept/Dec 2025) — beet ~56% / cane ~44% of U.S. production; production and price context. https://ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/outlooks/113592/SSS-M-448.pdf
2. American Sugarbeet Growers Association / American Sugar Alliance — ~10,000 growers, ~11 states, ~1.1M acres, ~20 factories, cooperative structure, supply-chain jobs and economic impact (2024). https://americansugarbeet.org/
3. American Crystal Sugar Company, "About Our Cooperative" — grower-owned structure, Red River Valley (2024). https://www.crystalsugar.com/about-our-cooperative/
4. Agweek / Red River Farm Network, "American Crystal Sugar Co. beet stock sets record high price" — beet-stock trading and payout basis (2024–2026). https://www.agweek.com/news/sugarbeet/american-crystal-sugar-stock-shares-hit-record-high-price
5. American Crystal Sugar Company, "How We Make Sugar" — integrated factory process description. https://www.crystalsugar.com/about-our-cooperative/how-we-make-sugar/
6. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners — Background" — industry structure, perishability, vertical integration. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/background
7. U.S. Census Bureau, "2022 NAICS Definitions — 311313 Beet Sugar Manufacturing" (scope and exclusions, adjacent codes 111991, 311314). https://www.census.gov/naics/
8. U.S. Beet Sugar Association — seven manufacturers, 19 factories, 10 states, cooperative ownership, union labor. https://beetsugar.org/about/
9. AgriStuff / AgMRC, "Sugar Manufacturers in the U.S." and "Sugarbeet Profile" — major processors and footprints (2024–2026). https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/grains-oilseeds/sugarbeet-profile
10. U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census — Concentration for NAICS 311313 (receipts $4.360B; 12 firms; CR4 78.6%; CR8 99%; HHI 2,075). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/economic-census.html
11. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 311313 (employment ~7,050; establishments 29; annual payroll ~$465M). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp.html
12. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners Outlook" (July 2026) — beet production 5.370M STRV FY24/25, 4.996M FY25/26, 4.821M FY26/27 forecast; 1.033M acres; extraction rates; deliveries. https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/29364/sss-m-455.pdf?v=74805
13. USDA NASS, Crop Values 2025 Summary — 2024 sugar-beet crop value $2.449B, $69.40/ton grower price. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/cpvl0226.pdf
14. USDA, FY2026 Sugar Marketing Allocations — processor-level allocations (American Crystal 2.062M, Amalgamated 1.253M, etc.); total beet allotment 5.525M STRV. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-02723.pdf
15. The Desert Review / Calexico Chronicle, "Spreckels to close last sugar beet plant in CA" (2025). https://www.thedesertreview.com/news/spreckels-to-close-last-sugar-beet-plant-in-ca/article_2f7271cd-53bf-4dca-99e7-e3eb82f5f912.html
16. Food Business News / United Sugars Corporation — marketing cooperative, "Crystal"/"Pillsbury Best" brands, ~one-quarter of U.S. sugar demand (2024). https://unitedsugarpr.com/who-we-are/our-members/
17. U.S. International Trade Commission, "Sugar Industry Structure" executive briefing — top five processors 85.6% of FY2023 beet allocations; four principal states 82.5% of capacity; 23 closures since 1981. https://www.usitc.gov/sites/default/files/publications/332/executive_briefings/ebot_gehrke_sugar_industry_structure_part_2.pdf
18. Wikipedia / ad-hoc-news, "Südzucker AG" — listed European beet processor, ~63% grower-cooperative control, ticker SZU (2026). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCdzucker
19. American Crystal Sugar Company, SEC Form 10-K filing — share restrictions, acreage requirements, limited private market. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/4828/000110465908073312/a08-28147_110k.htm
20. Red River Land Co., "Beet Stock" — recent American Crystal beet-stock sale prices ($5,550–$6,000/share) (2024–2026). https://www.redriverlandco.com/beet-stock
21. Western Sugar Cooperative, "Our Growers" — closed cooperative, one preferred share per acre, share transfer mechanics. https://www.westernsugar.com/who-we-are/our-growers/
22. ScienceDirect / ACS Omega, "Sugar Beet Pulp" and "Reactive Extraction of Betaine from Sugarbeet Processing Byproducts" — co-products (pulp, molasses, betaine) (2023). https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/sugar-beet-pulp
23. USDA Farm Service Agency, "USDA Announces FY2026 Sugar Loan Rates" — national average 32.77¢/lb refined beet, regional range 32.56–33.66¢ (Sept 2025). https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/09-26-2025/usda-announces-fiscal-year-2026-sugar-loan-rates-no-actions-feedstock
24. GAO, "Sugar Program: Domestic Support" (GAO-24-106144) — 2022 U.S. wholesale 52.3¢/lb vs 24.2¢ world refined price. https://www.gao.gov/assets/870/863453.pdf
25. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners — Policy" — allotments (54.35%/45.65% split), TRQs, 85% minimum, program mechanics. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/sugar-and-sweeteners/policy
26. Congressional Research Service, "Farm Bill Primer: Sugar Program" / "Fundamental Elements of the U.S. Sugar Program" — allotment split, Feedstock Flexibility, no-net-cost design. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/IF10689.html
27. American Crystal Sugar Company, "News: Shareholders Harvest a Record-Breaking Crop, Face Market Challenges" (Dec 2025) — $78/ton 2024 payment, $43.85/ton 2025 forecast. https://www.crystalsugar.com/about-our-cooperative/news-media/news/american-crystal-sugar-company-shareholders-harvest-a-record-breaking-crop-face-market-challenges/
28. Terrain / American AgCredit, "Big Supplies, Slowing Demand Roil Sugar Prices, Margins"; Southern Ag Today — 2024–2025 price decline and ~$1,600/acre costs. https://www.terrainag.com/insights/big-supplies-slowing-demand-roil-sugar-prices-margins/
29. USDA Economic Research Service, "Sugar and Sweeteners Outlook" (May 2026) — demand uncertainty, GLP-1 drugs, eating habits. https://ers.usda.gov/media/20880/sss-m-453.pdf?v=98857
30. USDA Economic Research Service, "Caloric Sweetener Analysis" — per-capita sweetener availability 153.6 lbs (1999) to 123.5 lbs (2023); refined sugar 68.4 lbs (2023). https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/110515
31. NPR / Bloomberg / CNN, "Coca-Cola cane sugar launch" and MAHA/HFCS context (July–Oct 2025). https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/nx-s1-5476161/coca-cola-cane-sugar-coke-trump-recipe
32. Federal Register, "Sugar From Mexico: Continuation of Suspension of the Antidumping Duty Investigation" (Sept 19, 2025). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/09/19/2025-18222/sugar-from-mexico-continuation-of-suspension-of-the-antidumping-duty-investigation
33. U.S. Rep. Julie Fedorchak, press release — congressional call for a Section 301 investigation into unfair sugar trade practices (2025). https://fedorchak.house.gov/media/press-releases/fedorchak-hoeven-slotkin-carter-lead-call-section-301-investigation-unfair
34. USDA Economic Research Service, "Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops" — 98% herbicide-tolerant sugar beet adoption by 2013. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/83714
35. Wikipedia, "Genetically modified sugar beet"; Capital Press — ~95% Roundup Ready adoption; dicamba-tolerant traits and drift concerns (2023–2024). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_sugar_beet
36. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "Bioengineered Food Disclosure FAQ" — refined sugar disclosure standard. https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/be/faq/general
37. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024 Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities — beet sugar manufacturing 6.8 TRC, 4.6 DART per 100 FTE. https://www.bls.gov/web/osh/table-1-industry-rates-national.htm
38. Civil Eats, "After 150 Years, California's Sugar Beet Industry Comes to an End" — Brawley closure, ~$100M investment, sector economics, ~14% of beet factories closed in a decade (Dec 2025). https://civileats.com/2025/12/08/after-150-years-californias-sugar-beet-industry-comes-to-an-end/
39. Western Farm Press / Farm Progress, "California's last sugar beet facility closes" (2025). https://www.farmprogress.com/business/california-s-last-sugar-beet-facility-closes
40. Art's-Way Manufacturing, 2025 Form 10-K — American Crystal payment decline impact on beet equipment orders. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/7623/000143774926003904/artw20251130_10k.htm