Two crops make southern Alberta’s farm country a little different from the rest of the prairies: sugar beets and potatoes. Both need irrigation, both are dug out of the ground in the fall, and both go mostly to factories close to home.
Sugar beets: a sweet century
Southern Alberta’s first sugar beet harvest came in 1902, when a sugar factory opened in Raymond. That plant closed in 1914, but in 1925 an idle factory from Idaho was taken apart and rebuilt in Raymond. Another followed at Picture Butte in 1936, and the factory at Taber opened in 1950. Today Taber is the only sugar beet factory left in Canada, and it makes about 8% of the country’s sugar. The rest comes from imported cane sugar.
- About 22,500 acres of beets were grown in 2025, below the recent average of about 28,000.
- A good crop is about 33 tonnes of beets per acre.
- It takes about 5 lb of beets to make 1 lb of sugar.
Beet harvest
Beets are dug in October. You’ll see trucks hauling them to piling grounds at places like Picture Butte, Coaldale, Taber and Vauxhall, where they’re stacked in long piles that can stay there into the winter. From October to early February, the beets are trucked to the factory, washed, sliced and soaked in hot water to draw out the sugar. Nothing goes to waste: the leftover pulp and molasses become livestock feed.
Potatoes: Canada’s top potato province
Alberta now grows more potatoes than any other province: about 81,760 acres in 2025, or 27% of Canada’s crop, and about 86,000 acres planted in 2026. Much of the growth has come from new processing plants in the south.
- Most of the crop goes to processing: in 2022, about 63% went to french fries and other frozen products and about 10% to chips.
- About 19% is seed potatoes, a crop Alberta is known for. Most seed and table potatoes are grown north of Calgary.
- Processing potatoes are grown mostly under irrigation in the Taber and Lethbridge area.
- One study found Alberta’s potato industry adds about $2.9 billion a year to Canada’s economy.
Potato harvest
Harvest starts with early chip potatoes in late July or August. Fry potatoes headed for storage are dug from about mid-September. On hot afternoons, crews often stop digging at midday, because warm potatoes don’t store well. Watch for big diggers working the long, ridged rows and trucks lined up at the edge of the field.
Learn more
See the sugar beet and potato tiles in our Farm Country guide. Sources: Galt Museum & Archives; Canadian Sugar Institute; Western Producer (2025); Statistics Canada (2025, 2026); Alberta Farmer Express (2023).
Top photo: USDA, public domain.