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22 Sugar Producer JANUARY 2018 Finding the Right Combination How beets react to nitrogen inputs under different tillage systems FERTILIZERS | By Chengci Chen, Reza Keshavarz Afshar, Bart Stevens, Abdelaziz Nilahyane, Ronald Brown, William Iversen & Timothy Fine The sugar industry in eastern Montana and western North Dakota contributes substantially to the regional economy. Dean Bangsund at North Dakota State University estimated total direct economic impacts of sugarbeet production, processing and marketing in Montana and North Dakota at $73.9 million in 2011. Tax collections generated by the sugarbeet industry from sales and use, personal income, and corporate income taxes in the two-state region exceeded $1.8 million in fiscal 2011. Conventional tillage is a common practice in sugarbeet production, which consists of five or more passes across a field for plowing, leveling and hilling, all of which is expensive, labor- and fuel-intensive and has many unintended consequences for soils and the environment. The negative impacts include soil organic matter degradation, soil erosion by wind, and wind damage to sugarbeet seedlings. In recent years, there has been increasing interest from beet growers to practice conservation tillage in sugarbeet production. Implementation of an appropriate conservation tillage system would result in lowering production cost and protect soils from erosion. However, it is not clear if conservation tillage, especially no-till, will reduce sugarbeet yield and sucrose concentration. Furthermore, beet growers want to know if the fertility requirements, especially nitrogen input, are the same under conventional and conservation tillage. The objectives of this study were to: 1) test the feasibility of practicing conservative tillage and evaluate if conservative tillage can produce the similar yield and sucrose concentration as the conventional tillage; and 2) test if conservative tillage requires different amounts of nitrogen input to achieve an optimum application rate. MATERIALS AND METHODS A field study was conducted at the Eastern Agricultural Research Center at Sidney, Mont., in 2017. The experiment was a split-plot randomized complete block design with four replications. Main plots were allocated to tillage treatments, including conventional tillage, strip tillage, and no-till. Subplots were assigned to nitrogen rates of 50, 100, Though analysis showed no significant difference among the tillage treatments in root yield and impurity, slightly lower sucrose concentration was present under strip tillage.