Rebirth of former sugar plant is sweet news for Toppenish

TOPPENISH, Wash. -- For more than four decades, the 41-acre tract in north Toppenish held one of the Lower Valley city’s largest employers.

Hundreds of people worked at the U&I Sugar Co, where they coaxed sucrose out of sugar beets — large, pale taproots that grew to 5 pounds or more in nearby fields.

But in 1979, battered by cheap imported cane sugar, the company shut down its plants across the West.

For years, the towering silos, remaining concrete buildings and weed-covered yard sat empty, at times attracting various, and sometimes ill-fated, enterprises.

Today, after a few fits and starts, the site is again showing signs of economic activity. Diesel fuel additives are manufactured there, as well as soil supplements made from recycled drywall.

“It is a nice piece of property,” said Dave Brown, who is expanding his Selah-based Pro Ag Services to the site.

It’s a trend city officials are hoping will continue.

“It’s a prime location,” said Lance Hoyt, Toppenish’s city manager. “We would love to have someone come in there and create 800 jobs.”

Where it began

The story of Toppenish’s sugar plant actually starts in Utah in the 1850s.

Seeking to become more self-reliant in the remote Utah territory, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looked into cultivating sugar beets, which were successfully used in Europe as an alternative to sugar cane.

But there was a problem: The Great Basin’s alkali soil made it difficult to grow the beets. One observer noted that first attempt to exact sugar from the beet resulted in a product that would “take the end of your tongue off.”

But a botanist had resolved that issue in 1887, and two years later, church leaders invested in the sugar-beet process, establishing the Utah Sugar Co.

It merged with other companies in 1907 to form the Utah & Idaho Sugar Co., with the church holding a controlling interest in the business, which expanded throughout the Intermountain West and into the Pacific Northwest.

U&I started refining sugar beets in Toppenish in 1919, but the work halted six years later when the sugar beet crop became infested with white flies. But sugar processing resumed in 1936, after a resistant strain of beets was developed and a new plant was built in Toppenish, with operations going into full swing in 1937.

At the plant, the beets were sliced into thin chips, steeped in hot water to leach out the sucrose, then pressed to remove the remaining bits of sugar juice from the pulp. The resulting juice was boiled into a syrup, which then crystallized into sugar.

The plant helped provide steady work as sugar refining kicked into high gear in in the fall.

“We worked at Del Monte in the summer, and then we would go to the sugar factory,” recalled Mike Johnson, who worked in the plant’s warehouse in 1964 and 1965. When the “campaigns” began, as Johnson said the work sessions were called, crews would work around the clock extracting every last granule of sugar from the beets and packaging it in bags of powdered and granular sugar, ranging from 1 to 100 pounds.

At times, more than 400 people would be employed in the plant.

After the closing

The plant’s 1979 closure not only affected workers but the entire city as the economic loss rippled through the city when other businesses began looking for more promising places to set up shop.

But the site wasn’t completely dead.

S.S. Steiner, a Yakima hop company, began using a warehouse on the site in the early 1980s to store hops and equipment, said Dave Tobin, Steiner’s logistics manager and hop buyer. The company is still there, at the back of the site, employing six people at the warehouse, Tobin said.

In 1986, Gerhard Zimm, a Canadian entrepreneur proposed using the plant to recycle tires, breaking them down into carbon, petroleum and steel.

Instead, the place became glutted with used tires, while Zimm was accused of improperly removing asbestos from the building and not paying his bills. He fled the country in 1994 after being indicted by a federal grand jury for violating environmental laws, leaving behind about $2.6 million in unpaid bills.

The property was cleaned up in 1995, but plans to turn it into an industrial park fell through, and efforts to sell the property with the old U&I buildings were deemed unfeasible. Most of the buildings on the site were torn down in 2003, leaving its iconic silos and some of the smaller buildings.

William Rathbone, Toppenish’s community development director, said the property was subsequently subdivided and sold, with one business, Terraverde Bio-Sciences LLC, operating in the south end where liquid sugar used to be processed.

According to signs at the site, the company produces and distributes Blue Sky diesel exhaust fluid, which a company website describes as a urea-based solution that reduces air pollution from diesel exhaust.

Attempts to contact company officials were not successful. Workers at the plant said only the owners could speak to reporters, and calls to the company were not returned.

Another part of the property was used by a recycling company, which Rathbone said had “got out of control” before it went out of business. It left the property choked with all kinds of garbage, Rathbone said.

New owner

But that part of the property was acquired a year and a half ago by Pro Ag Services, which sells lime and gypsum as agricultural soil supplements, as well as installs trellis systems.

Brown, Pro Ag’s owner, was familiar with the property, as he’s used the lime pits across the street as a source of material for the past 25 years. And the site offers space for his growing business.

But the 11-acre area Brown bought has also been a bit of a fixer-upper, he admits. He had to haul off dozens of truckloads of debris, as well as install a truck scale.

One of the things his company does there is gather old sheetrock, and sell the gypsum to farmers around the state looking to put calcium back into the ground. Right now, the company employs about two or three people at the site, Brown said.

Rathbone said Brown’s business is a welcome addition to the site.

“It’s a very clean operation,” Rathbone said.

Hoyt said the city is working with New Vision, the nonprofit economic development association, to promote the site. One company approached the city, Hoyt said, proposing to use the site’s silos to store and distribute cement components, but the city has not heard from them in a while.

The city has taken steps to make the site more attractive, Hoyt said. When the city recently completed a new well and water tower nearby, it extended a 16-inch water main to the corner of the property, making city water available for future development.

Brown is also looking at what else he can use the site for.

“It has the potential for being used for a lot of things,” Brown said.