Family Farmers, U.S. Workers Keep America Sweet

If you ate today, you can thank a farmer for growing the food that went into that meal, and all the hardworking people who moved those crops from the farm to your table.

All-natural real sugar is an essential and functional ingredient in our food supply and is proudly produced by American sugarbeet and sugarcane farmers and workers. In fact, American farmers produce the equivalent of about 4.5 billion 4-pound bags of sugar each year!

More than 100 domestic sugar factories, mills, refineries, and storage facilities ensure that sugar is delivered when and where it's needed - whether it's a rail car full of sugar for a candy company or a single-serving packet for your local coffee shop.

Today, on National Ag Day, we celebrate the men and women who make up America's sweetest industry and thank them for ensuring our grocery store shelves are always stocked with sugar.

Check out the coast-to-coast reach of the U.S. sugar industry.

America's sugar industry contributes over $23.3 billion to the country's economy, supports more than 151,000 good paying jobs, and ensures our supply of an essential food ingredient is not in the hands of foreign governments.

However, our sugarbeet and sugarcane growers can't keep growing the food we need without sustained bipartisan support from Congress.

As the cost of producing sugar has skyrocketed, the prices our producers receive have not kept pace. Sugar prices have dropped more than a third in the past 2 years. Foreign countries, like Brazil and India, have used subsidies for their own sugar industries to create excess capacity and pump out more surplus sugar to the world market, driving prices down below the cost of production, and flooding the U.S., above and beyond the amounts established by our trade agreements.

As Idaho sugarbeet farmer Zach Patterson, president of the Snake River Sugarbeet Growers Association, wrote in a recent op-ed published in the Idaho Stateman:

"Some [sugarbeet farmers] are even tapping into farm equity to try to keep the farm afloat for another year. Sugar is an incredibly important food ingredient, and we need to produce it in America, but farmers can't do that if they are losing hundreds of dollars an acre multiple years in a row, as foreign sugar overwhelms the U.S. market."

These financial pressures have caused many family farms and factories to close their doors for good. Since 2000, more than 40% of U.S. sugar mills, refineries, and sugarbeet factories have closed. The last remaining sugarbeet factory in California decommissioned its facility at the end of last year. The costs of doing business were simply too high in the face of low and declining beet sugar prices.

We are grateful to the American workers and farmers who have put their whole hearts into producing American-made sugar and we hope to celebrate many more National Ag Days to come. Preserving American factory jobs, American family farms, and a strong supply of an American-made ingredient is something worth fighting for.