date:Mar 25, 2013
,000 acres of the gnarly root vegetable, with 11 sugar mills processing the beets. But as sugar prices collapsed, the mills shut down. Only one remains in the Imperial Valley.
When the last local mill in Mendota closed in 2008, farmers formed a cooperative and tried - unsuccessfully - to buy it back.
We were left with a choice: Are we going to build our own sugar mill, which is expensive, or come up with something else? said William Pucheu, a farmer from Tranquility who is part of the cooperat