Michigan Sugar Company earns award for conservation efforts
Connor Veenstra, Staff writer
Michigan Sugar Company Director of Research and Agronomy Corey Guza, left, receives a conservation award from Ben Wickerham on behalf of Michigan Sugar.
Michigan Sugar Company/Courtesy
Michigan Sugar Company has worked for years to make farming sugarbeets a more environmentally healthy practice, and the company recently received recognition for its efforts.
According to a press release, Michigan Sugar Director of Research and Agronomy Corey Guza received the Conservation Excellence Agribusiness Award on behalf of the company from The Nature Conservancy.
Guza has spent his years at Michigan Sugar working with his team to research different ways to keep sugarbeet farming sustainable and profitable. His efforts have included studying relationships between different nutrients and ways to reduce nutrient applications to maximize both sugarbeet yield and conservation.
Last year, he led Michigan Sugar in co-developing a conservation proposal that netted nearly $1 million to support education and training, promotion and technical assistance for the adoption of climate-smart practices in Michigan's sugarbeet-growing region.
"It is an honor to be recognized by The Nature Conservancy, and I accept this award on behalf of the entire Michigan Sugar team that is working toward a more sustainable future," Guza said. "It truly is a team effort."
Michigan Sugar is one of many ag companies that have taken the reigns for conservation in the last five years, a representative of the conservancy said.
Ben Wickerham, the agriculture program director of The Nature Conservancy's Michigan chapter, said many companies in the agricultural industry have taken leadership roles in sustainability, outpacing even conservation organizations. With Michigan Sugar being a farmer-owned co-op, it gives the company as a whole a better idea of what's needed in the fields and a greater incentive to find new methods of sustainability.
"It's really neat to see a commodity group in the ag industry like this be a lead in climate-smart agriculture," Wickerham said.
What's more impressive, he added, is that Michigan Sugar does all this while also handling a unique, important crop. Sugarbeets are not only economically essential to the area but have unusual challenges, timelines and farming equipment that come with the process. The company handles all of this while finding ways to make the crop sustainable and economically supportive.
"I give props for trying to support both those things at the same time," Wickerham said.
The Nature Conservancy is a global conservation organization, with individual chapters in every U.S. state and several different countries.
Connor Veenstra
Connor Veenstra is a staff reporter for the Huron Daily Tribune.