Michigan Sugar Company tells Agriculture Committee that Farm Bill delay and recent closures threaten domestic supply

John Boothroyd, director of government relations for Michigan Sugar Company, told the Agriculture Committee that Michigan’s sugar‑beet industry is large, tightly margined and vulnerable to international pressure and a delayed federal Farm Bill.

Boothroyd said Michigan Sugar is a grower‑owned cooperative and that ‘‘of the eight sugar beet companies in the country, all of them . . . utilize the cooperative model’’ and that sugar beet sugar supplies a majority of U.S. sugar. He told committee members the company manages roughly 140,000 acres of sugar beets in 17 to 20 Michigan counties and processes about 4,800,000 tons of beets into roughly 1.3 billion pounds of sugar in a campaign season.

The matters Boothroyd raised matter because he said the United States imports about 30 percent of its sugar and that recent U.S. plant…