Remembering the sugar beet, and how it drove a Beetdigger to college

People have lots of reasons why they decided to go to college. An inspiring teacher, perhaps, or an athletic or academic scholarship; maybe family tradition had a lot to do with it, or a simple thirst for knowledge.

For me it was the sugar beet.

I was 14 years old in the summer of 1963 when I heard a Draper farmer named Ron Crane was hiring kids to thin sugar beets. He was paying by the row, I can’t remember exactly how much, but it seemed like an easy way to make a little money to spend on the pinball machine at the Centre Drive-In, which had me more or less addicted.

To this point in my life I had not been properly introduced to the sugar beet industry, even though, providing I passed eighth and ninth grade, I was going to attend Jordan High School in the near future. The Jordan mascot was, and is, the Beetdiggers. The moniker dates back to the days when school would be stopped for a week or two every October so everybody in Sandy, which was littered with beet fields, could participate in the harvest by digging up beets and whacking off the roots — which contain the sucrose that produces the sugar.

By my time, mechanized harvesting machines had rendered the October beetdigging vacations long obsolete — to be replaced by students at other schools having a trash-talking field day whenever the Jordan High cheerleaders did the “Beetdigger echo” at football games. High school’s tough enough without being named after a vegetable.

But by the ’60s no one had yet devised a machine to thin the beet plants early in the summer after they began sprouting in the fields.

The plants had to be about 9 inches apart or they’d crowd each other out and there’d be no beets to harvest.

One morning my brother and I and a bunch of our friends met Crane at a field just north of where the state prison used to stand. He dispensed hoes and said he’d be back to check on us and we’d better have dirt on our fingers to prove we were stooping over when necessary to separate what were called “doubles” by hand.

The rows of beets stretched to a canal, which didn’t look all that far away … until we started hoeing.

All day, as Johnny Cash sang “Ring of Fire” on a transistor radio tuned to KSOP, we kept at it, keeping a sharp eye out for Crane’s truck, making sure we were bent over when it came by. By noon, I was envying the inmates next door. By the end of the day I still didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I knew it wasn’t going to be this.

I was driving south on I-15 recently when I glanced over at what used to be the Crane farm and is now, if I’m not mistaken, a furniture store parking lot — a vast improvement if you ask me — and the thought came to me, what happened to the sugar beets?

Not just Ron Crane’s. Everybody’s?

Utah used to be a sugar beet hotbed. Big farms and little farms grew sugar beets. Sugar beet factories stretched from one end of the state to the other.

I called Matt Hargreaves, the ever helpful information director at the Utah Farm Bureau (their office is in Sandy, next door to Jordan High School). He didn’t know of any current beet farmers, nor did his boss, Spencer Gibbons, but Gibbons referred me to his father, Darrel Gibbons, a former sugar beet farmer in Logan who pointed me in the direction of someone who better than anyone knows the rise and fall of Utah’s sugar beet history: Matt Godfrey.

Godfrey is more widely known as the LDS historian who poured 12 years of his life into the Joseph Smith Papers, but before that, he wrote his PhD dissertation at Washington State University on the Utah sugar beet industry.

He agreed to meet at the Church History Library, where he presented me with a copy of the book he wrote as a result of his dissertation: “Religion, Politics, and Sugar: The Mormon Church, the Federal Government and the Sugar Industry, 1907-1921.” It’s available on Amazon.

Godfrey’s 52, so he never thinned, dug or topped sugar beets on his grandfather’s farm in Cache Valley because he would have been 7 years old when the last sugar beet factory in Utah closed in Garland, Box Elder County, in 1979.

That ended, as Matt describes it, a 90-year run of sugar beet glory in Utah.

Like a lot of significant events in Utah’s early history, the sugar beet industry got its start when an LDS prophet cleared his throat. In this case, President Wilford Woodruff, who in 1889 stood up in a General Conference and, according to Matt, stated, “If I ever received a revelation about anything, it was that God wanted the sugar industry established in Utah.”

The floodgates opened after that. The LDS Church became a big financial backer of first the Utah Sugar Company and later its successor the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, while farmers up and down the state were encouraged by their ecclesiastical leaders to grow sugar beets.

There was also a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into unfair business practices in the 19-teens that you can read about in Matt’s book. Huge profits were made during the war years of World War I, when sugar was in short supply and high demand.

For the next 60-plus years, through the Great Depression and another world war, sugar beets were a cash crop for Utah farmers. The end came gradually, the result of increased outside competition and, believe it or not, artificial sweeteners.

Now, if you want to find a sugar beet field, “I think you’d have to drive up to Burley, Twin Falls, Jerome, that area in southeastern Idaho,” says Matt.

“It’s a pretty fascinating history; at least I think it’s pretty fascinating,” says Matt. “It (sugar beet farming) was a huge deal in Utah, such a huge cultural force, for most of the 20th century.”

He adds, “Whenever I speak about sugar to groups, invariably someone comes up and says, ‘I used to thin sugar beets,’ I used to work in a factory,’ or some variation of that. I think anyone over 65 years of age in Utah, the vast majority worked on a sugar beet farm once in their life.”

Guilty as charged, and I have the college education to prove it.