Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Michael Boland / The Western Sugar Cooperative is a 135,000 acre sugar beet processing cooperative
headquartered in Denver, Colorado with sugar beet processing factories located in Ft.
Morgan CO, Torrington WY, Scottsbluff NE, Lovell WY, and Billings MT. The objective
of the thesis is to analyze alternatives for maximizing the net revenue of co-products at
Western Sugar. The ethanol policies of the U.S. government have had many unintended
consequences including increasing the price of corn which is a key ingredient in animal
feed production. Sugar beet co-products are produced in fixed proportions. That is, for
every unit of sugar produced a corresponding unit of sugar beet pulp is created which is
mostly water. Historically this has been dried into an animal feed pellets, however
removing water from any high volume and high speed manufacturing process is energy
intensive. Natural gas prices have increased dramatically and are projected to stay that way
for a long time. As a result, the cost of manufacturing pellets is very high. The research
shows that we are able to significantly increase our net income by increasing the percentage
and price of pressed feed pulp rather than drying the pulp into pellets. This equals 20
million dollars of revenue in our pulp product line for the 2008-2009 sugar beet campaign.
The thesis contains various analyses for changes in critical costs and prices. More
importantly it details the subsequent management decisions implemented to maximize net
income in the co-products business.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:KSU/oai:krex.k-state.edu:2097/16174 |
| Date | January 1900 |
| Creators | Hofer, Michael |
| Publisher | Kansas State University |
| Source Sets | K-State Research Exchange |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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