Much like their small grain and row crop counterparts, area sugar beet producers continue to struggle with weather conditions that have been anything but sweet this harvest season.

"We're moving forward, but it has slowed," Sidney Sugars general manager Steve Sing said of this year's sugar beet harvest. "The weather certainly has impacted what we do here, mainly just through the harvest. It hasn't hurt our factory production yet."

Last week's cold spell that saw almost five nights of temperatures in the low 20s or high teens and daytime highs that failed to get above freezing seriously impacted this year's harvest.

"That froze the beets we have in the field almost to ground level," Sing said.

He said the frozen sugar beets are going to thaw out, but the question is are they going to heal enough to allow them to be put into long-term storage piles. "They are slowly healing up. It will be a few days for sure before we know if we can get some of the beets or all of them," Sing said.

This very abnormal fall means about 70 percent of this year's beet crop remains in the field if the Sidney plant is correct with its estimated tonnage per acre, he said.

"Some growers have 80 percent," Sing said of what remains to be harvested. "Usually by this time we're 60 percent to 70 percent done. We've just had to sit for quite a while now."

Sing thinks this year's sugar beet crop may be a little bit better than originally anticipated.

"We were estimating about 26.4 tons per acre. There are some growers that are reporting they are significantly above that," said Sing, who added a new harvest target hasn't been set.

Part of the explanation behind the larger crop is producers are able to enjoy very clean fields with the use of Roundup-ready technology.

"They can spray the fields with Roundup, which means they can kill all of the weeds and not hurt the beets, which means there is no competition for nutrients," Sing said.

The advances in chemicals also has allowed sugar beet producers to keep ahead of the work in the field.

"They don't have to cultivate as much. They don't use as much fuel," he said. "We are using less chemical and less fuel to get a better crop."

These advances in "green technology" go hand-in-hand with advances that continue to be made in new sugar beet varieties, he added.

Sing is expecting this fall's sugar beet harvest to be around 650,000 tons. Past years have seen closer to 900,000 tons harvested, but fewer acres were planted this year, he said.

Sing hopes a return of warmer temperatures and drier weather this past weekend allows producers to get back into the fields.

"They will have to scalp them fairly severely and take off most of the top that was damaged," he said.

Given better weather conditions, Sing believes producers need two weeks get everything harvested.