Sugar beets and the Great Western factory shaped Logan County farming

Few crops left a deeper mark on Logan County than the sugar beet.

In the early 1900s, a sugar factory opened in Sterling, and it soon came under the Great Western Sugar Company, the firm that ran much of Colorado’s beet industry. A factory like that shaped the country around it. It contracted with farmers for beets, which encouraged irrigated farming along the South Platte. It needed workers through the long seasons of planting, thinning, and harvest, and Sterling grew with that work. And it gave local farms a steady cash crop tied to a national market.

Some of that history still shows. Irrigated fields line the lower South Platte valley, and the farm-and-town pattern the beet era helped build remains a backbone of the county. The industry also drew farm-labor families from many backgrounds over the decades, part of a larger story across northern Colorado that careful histories tell well.

The beet-factory era in Sterling eventually ended, as it did in most Colorado towns that once had a factory. But the crop helped set the shape of how the county farms and where its people settled.

For the history of the beet industry and its role in towns like Sterling, see History Colorado and the Colorado State Archives, with CSU Extension for background on sugar beet farming in Colorado.