Sugar Beets

Sugar beets didn't become Colorado's first major cash crop by accident. Scientists, businessmen, and newspapers spent thirty years singing the praises of this starchy root, which as early as the 1860s was found to be perfectly suited to Colorado's climate and soils. Among their other virtues, beets provided a double harvest - the root yielded sugar, while the rest of the plant was marketable as livestock feed. It took decades for local planters to embrace this unfamiliar crop, but when they finally did so around 1900 the prairie economy took off. By 1920 the value of Colorado's beet harvest had multiplied twentyfold, and Colorado had become the nation's top sugar producing slate, accounting for a third of U.S. output., Great Western Sugar Company , For more than half a century, the Great Western Sugar Company helped drive the economy of Colorado's eastern prairies. The conglomerate built fifteen processing plants along the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers between 1901 and 1910, creating economic opportunity for local farmers laborers, packers, shippers, and sundry other agents. Towns competed vigorously to attract Great Western mills, and no wonder: After Fort Morgan's factory opened in 1906, the city's land values soared from $40 to $250 per acre. Great Western prospered into the 1970s, but corporate neglect caused a steep decline; one by one its plants shut down. The Fort Morgan site closed in 1985 but reopened in 1986 under new ownership, and a new name - Western Sugar. Today it and a Greeley mill are all that remain of Great Western's sugar kingdom in Colorado.