Sugar beets became Colorado's first major cash crop after scientists, businessmen, and newspapers spent thirty years promoting a starchy root found as early as the 1860s to be well suited to Colorado's climate and soils. Beets offered a double harvest, with the root yielding sugar and the rest of the plant marketable as livestock feed. Local planters took decades to adopt the unfamiliar crop, but when they did around 1900 the prairie economy expanded rapidly. By 1920, the value of Colorado's beet harvest had increased twentyfold, and the state produced a third of U.S. sugar. For more than half a century, the Great Western Sugar Company helped drive the economy of Colorado's eastern prairies by building fifteen processing plants along the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers between 1901 and 1910, creating opportunity for farmers, laborers, packers, shippers, and others. Towns competed intensely for Great Western mills; after Fort Morgan's factory opened in 1906, land values there rose from $40 to $250 per acre. Great Western remained prosperous into the 1970s before corporate neglect led to a steep decline and plant closures. The Fort Morgan site closed in 1985, reopened in 1986 under new ownership as Western Sugar, and today it and a mill in Greeley are all that remain of Great Western's sugar industry in Colorado.