The Sugar Beet Boom: German-Russians, Mexicans, and the Fields of the Panhandle

The sugar beet is a deceptively difficult crop. It grows underground, out of sight, in long tapered roots that can weigh two or three pounds each. Planting, thinning, weeding, and harvesting beets in the early twentieth century was backbreaking work that had to be done by hand, on your knees, in the dirt, for weeks at a time. Industrial-scale beet farming in the North Platte Valley depended entirely on finding enough people willing to do that work.

The Great Western Sugar Company solved the problem in two phases. Beginning around nineteen hundred and two, the company recruited German-Russian immigrants, a distinctive community of Germans who had settled in Russia after the seventeen sixties, then emigrated to the Great Plains starting in the eighteen seventies. Special trains ran each spring from Lincoln and Omaha into the Panhandle, carrying German-Russian families to work the fields. At first they came seasonally, returning to cities in the fall. Then the company encouraged them to stay, to rent or buy land, to build communities. They did. German-Russian families transformed the valley's demographics and built churches and communities that are still here today.

The second phase of labor recruitment reached into Texas. Beginning in the nineteen tens and twenties and continuing through the nineteen forties, Mexican American workers traveled north from the Texas border region to work the beet fields. During World War Two, with farm labor scarce and demand for beet sugar soaring because Philippine cane sugar was cut off by the war with Japan, the federal government lifted growing restrictions and acreage expanded. Every available hand was needed. The sugar beet industry's enormous industrial footprint in Scottsbluff, the factory that still operates today, was built and maintained on the labor of these two communities, most of whose names are not on any monument but whose work made this valley what it became.