Sugar Beets and the Farm Country

Look past the timbered downtown and Frankenmuth sits in the middle of some of the richest farmland in Michigan, and one crop above all defines it: the sugar beet. The dark, heavy soil of the Saginaw Valley turned out to be ideal for sugar beets, a homely root vegetable that is quietly one of the region's great economic engines. Just north of town lies the Saginaw Valley Research and Extension Center, where much of the science behind Michigan's sugar beet crop is worked out, part of more than a hundred years of sugar beet research in the state.

The industry is enormous. The Michigan Sugar Company, a grower owned cooperative with about a thousand farmer owners, plants and harvests as much as one hundred sixty thousand acres of sugar beets each year across some twenty Michigan counties and into Ontario, Canada. Those beets become the sugar sold under familiar brands throughout the Midwest.

So while visitors come for chicken and Christmas ornaments, the German and Franconian families who settled here were, first and always, farmers. The beet fields stretching out around the town are the working landscape that has sustained Frankenmuth far longer than tourism has, a reminder that beneath the Bavarian charm lies genuine Michigan farm country.