Split Personality

Sugar beets were once big business in Northern California. Among the region’s sweetest spots for beet farming was King Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The island’s soft loamy peat soil could produce 20-25 tons of beets per acre annually, yielding about 2,500 pounds of sugar. After picking and processing, the leafy tops of the plant, the pulp remaining after pressing, and the beet molasses produced during refining were used to feed livestock, so nothing went to waste.

But sugar beets are perishable, meaning they need to be trucked to the factory immediately after harvesting. In the late 1920s, that job