Anyone approaching Suluova from the west or the east sees the chimneys rising from the flat plain first and the town only afterwards. The order is no accident, because the present layout of the district took shape after those chimneys began to smoke. When the factory was built, the plain was partly marsh, partly poor pasture, and was known for malaria. More than seventy years later the same plain is associated with sugar beet, onions, wheat and livestock, the population of the district stands above forty thousand, and every autumn the factory is still the centre of queues of trucks, weighing stations and clouds of steam.

From Marsh to Plain

According to the district history page of the Suluova District Governorate, before 1950 a large part of the plain was covered by marshes or standing water. Drainage was inadequate, so farmland suffered from a high water table and salinity, and malaria made the plain uninhabitable, especially in summer. Some families spent the summer on the highland pastures at the foot of Akdağ. Scarce fertile land and low yields brought famine in dry years.

The change began before the factory. In 1950 tractors and other machinery were distributed to farmers with Marshall Plan aid, and in the same years the marshes were drained and poorly drained areas were reclaimed. As the number of tractors grew, the unproductive meadows and pastures that occupied much of the plain were broken up and opened to cultivation. Even so, the same source stresses that conscious, systematic farming on the plain began mainly with the opening of the Amasya Sugar Factory. The ground had been prepared, but it was the factory that determined what would be planted on it, how, and where the harvest would go.

Little in the older history of the region foreshadows this picture of the plain. In the sources the settlement appears in the first years of the Common Era as "Arguma"; at the end of the 13th century it is called "Alaflı", it became a nahiye (sub-district) in 1902 under the name "Suluca", and the name Suluova was adopted only in 1946. According to the governorate's account, in 1101 the Seljuk Sultan Kılıçarslan I and Danishmend Gazi fought a Crusader army in this area between Merzifon and Amasya, and in 1402 Çelebi Mehmed defeated Kara Devlet Şah, the governor appointed by Timur, near Suluova. These events show that the plain had long been a corridor; its population and economy, however, gained lasting weight only when an industrial plant was built. According to a compilation titled "Amasya'da Sanayi ve Gelişimi" (Industry and Its Development in Amasya), Suluova was a small settlement of 1,110 people before the sugar factory. The same compilation says the population of the centre later rose above 37,000; the governorate's 2015 figures give 37,636 for the centre and 46,612 for the district as a whole.

The Expansion of the Sugar Industry

The founding of the factory cannot be treated as a purely Suluova affair. Until 1950 Turkey had only four sugar factories (Alpullu, Uşak, Eskişehir and Turhal), which could not keep up with growing demand. The Democrat Party, which came to power in 1950, decided in 1951 to expand the sugar industry; the factories of Adapazarı (1953), Amasya (1954), Konya, Kütahya, Burdur, Susurluk, Kayseri, Erzincan, Erzurum, Elazığ and Malatya were built under this programme, and the number of factories rose to fifteen in 1956. According to one academic abstract, Amasya Sugar was the eighth factory opened under the programme, in 1954.

The striking feature of the programme was that the new factories were founded as private joint-stock companies, and that farmers were meant to become partners in them through cooperatives. The reasoning had two sides. The new factories needed capital, and drawing on the farming population that would supply the raw material became the starting point for founding the beet cooperatives. Rather than farmers joining the factory one by one, it was thought preferable for a body formed collectively by them to take part in the capital. Baha Tekand, General Manager of the Turkish Sugar Factories, launched this organisation on 16 July 1951. Beet growers of Amasya were among the first to try this path and founded the Amasya Beet Growers' Cooperative the same year.

The cooperatives were not strong enough to buy the factories outright. All eleven factories built between 1953 and 1956 were founded as private joint-stock companies, and the growers' economic conditions at the time did not allow the factories to belong to the cooperatives. Even so, the beet cooperatives of their regions became partners in the capital of the Adapazarı, Amasya, Kayseri, Konya and Kütahya factories. Researchers who have studied the subject regard it as an important turning point that beet growers organised for the first time and came to hold a share of a company's capital. In Amasya the cooperative's share on behalf of farmers at the founding was 23 per cent; the Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry reports that the share has since reached 71.5 per cent.

From Foundation to Production: 1953 and 1954

The foundation-laying ceremony took place on 13 September 1953. President Celal Bayar, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, Minister of State Enterprises Sıtkı Yırcalı, Baha Tekand, General Manager of the Turkish Sugar Factories, deputies and thousands of people attended. Bayar is said to have laid the first mortar on the foundation with the wish that it be "auspicious". A year later, on 11 September 1954, the factory was put into operation and ran its first campaign that same autumn.

According to the sources, the initial capacity was 1,800 or 1,890 tonnes of beet per day. The Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives 1,890, one compilation gives 1,800; the present chairman of the factory's board also said in an interview that capacity had risen from "1,800 tonnes" to today's level. Capacity was raised to 2,400 tonnes a day in 1965 and 4,800 tonnes in 1968. These three steps also show how fast the factory grew as beet cultivation spread across the plain.

The sources do not agree fully on the opening ceremony. A 2022 report by Anadolu Agency says the factory was opened in 1954 by the then Prime Minister Menderes; the Amasya Governorate, on the other hand, records that the foundation was laid in 1953 by Bayar and Menderes. Only the foundation ceremony, which appears in both sources, is described in detail here. According to published campaign summaries, about nine thousand farmers grew beet for the first campaign, and in 73 days of work about 111.8 million kilograms of beet were processed and about 17.2 million kilograms of crystal sugar obtained; these figures could not be verified against the full text of a primary source.

A New Approach to Farming on the Plain

In the governorate's account the factory's most lasting effect was what it taught the farmer. Modern farming techniques were conveyed to farmers through intensive work by the company's agricultural engineers, and when credit in kind was added, rapid progress was made in agriculture. According to the same source, wheat yields and production, and fruit and vegetable production, improved, and orchards and poplar growing, which had hardly existed before, spread.

The factory maintains this tie with the farmer today. According to Ahmet Özarslan, chairman of the board, speaking to Anadolu Agency, the factory supplies the seed; advances for fertiliser, sowing, hoeing, irrigation and harvest also come from the factory, and beet payments are made shortly after harvest. According to Özarslan, in the 2022 season a payment of 160 million liras had been made to farmers in the Amasya region before a single kilogram of beet had been bought. In the same interview he says that the factory is a farmers' cooperative and that "the owner of this place is the farmer". An academic study on Pankobirlik confirms the same framework: in the cooperative factories the boards are elected by the votes of beet farmers, so it is the farmers who choose the manager.

The district's agriculture has not been limited to beet. According to the governorate, wheat above all, together with onions, barley, sugar beet, seed and silage maize, sunflower and chickpea, is grown commercially. All of the beet is processed at the factory in the district; seed is also produced from beet, and this provides farmers with additional income. Onions are the second great pillar of the district's economy and, if stored well, keep until April or May. In recent years staked tomatoes and fodder crops have been introduced as alternatives to onions, and in villages such as Yolpınar, Uzunoba, Saluca, Kurnaz and Boyalı apples, peaches and cherries have reached commercial scale.

How Beet Grows in the Field

The factory's agricultural department organises sowing planning and the arrangement of sowing, care and lifting through regional organisations. Beet is harvested about seven months after sowing, and the campaign begins when it ripens in mid-September. The factory runs day and night throughout the campaign; its length varies with the crop. An older promotional text gives 120 to 150 days and the Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry about 100 days; the 2006-2007 campaign lasted 71 days, during which 338 thousand tonnes of beet were processed and 37,450 tonnes of crystal sugar obtained. The campaign ends in January or February, and the rest of the year is given to maintenance and repair, the factory's "revision" period.

Beet arriving at the factory is weighed, handed to the assessors for quality control, and its sugar content is determined in the laboratory in about twenty minutes. After this the farmer receives the document showing the price of the delivered crop. The factory works with about 30,000 farmers in some 400 villages; according to Anadolu Agency, in 2022 farmers from 650 villages in Amasya, Samsun and Tokat were bringing in beet.

From Beet to Sugar

According to the factory's own description, beet is taken from the silos or trucks into channels with pressurised water, carried by water to the weed catcher and the stone catcher, where weeds and stones are removed, and then washed with clean water in the washing trough. Sliced in knives, the beet is weighed on an automatic scale and tipped into the diffuser. Inside the diffuser the sliced beet moves from one end to the other on screws and meets hot water coming from the opposite direction, giving its sugar to the water. In this way raw juice is obtained, containing the sugar together with non-sugar substances. The wet pulp that has given up its sugar is pressed; the water from the presses is sent back to the diffuser.

The purification of raw juice relies on the factory's own lime kilns. Limestone is burnt with coke to obtain lime and carbon dioxide gas; slaking the lime with water gives milk of lime. In the first liming the juice is treated with milk of lime up to pH 11 and non-sugar substances are separated; in the second liming the excess lime removes some of these substances through chemical reactions. The juice is then carbonated with carbon dioxide, filtered, and the sludge, its sugar removed in filter presses, is discarded, leaving thin juice. Thickened in evaporators, the thin juice becomes thick juice. At the factory this section, from the beet silo to the last evaporator, is called the "raw house".

After filtration the thick juice is mixed with intermediate sugar and affination sugar in melting tanks; the resulting syrup is called standard liquor. In the crystal boiling pan the water of the liquor is evaporated and crystal sugar massecuite obtained; the massecuite is cooled and processed in centrifuges. The crystals are separated and sent to drying, and the white sugar leaving the dryer is screened, taken into bunkers and filled into sacks. The section from the filtration of thick juice to the output of crystal sugar and molasses is called the "refinery". The dark brown syrup separated from the last-sugar centrifuges is called molasses, and the pressed pulp left after the sugar is taken is called küspe (beet pulp).

During the campaign the factory meets its electricity needs from its own steam turbines. The promotional text mentions four steam turbines with a combined installed power of 7.7 megawatts, boilers producing one hundred tonnes of steam an hour, and the use of low-sulphur lignite; annual lignite consumption is given as about 60 thousand tonnes. In a region with rich lignite beds this choice of fuel makes sense. The factory carries out most of its maintenance and repair in its own workshops. It treats its waste water in its own treatment plants and draws process water from the Tersakan stream. The sugar warehouse, with a stock capacity of 70 thousand tonnes, allows the product to be marketed in the months outside the campaign. According to Anadolu Agency's 2022 report, the conversion of beet into sugar passes through twenty separate operations.

The District That Grew Around the Factory

According to the governorate, after the sugar factory entered service in 1954 rapid urbanisation appeared around it, and the town centre shifted to the neighbourhood of the factory. In 1957 the municipality was founded and Suluova became a district. The dates should be understood in this order: urbanisation begins in 1954, district status comes in 1957. In some accounts the making of the district is tied directly to the founding of the factory; this is a simplification. The sources give the municipality's founding year as 1946 or 1957.

Heavy migration came to the area around the factory. The governorate writes that the district's population consists of people from its villages and from Taşova, Ladik, Gümüşhacıköy, Kavak, Zile and Vezirköprü, along with migrants from Kars, Erzurum, Gümüşhane, Sivas and the Black Sea. The factory's effect also shows in schooling; the governorate's account lists progress in farming and livestock, the strengthening of industry and the rise in schooling rates in the same sentence. The factory's own dispensary, its guesthouse with 28 rooms and 41 beds, and its meeting hall for 200 people are also counted among the district's infrastructure.

Mayor Rıfat Uzun said at the opening of the 2025 campaign that the factory was not only a production centre but also a social centre; he mentioned its contribution to the Borsa, Malik, Şeker, Orta and Cumhuriyet neighbourhoods and said the factory had taught them "to be a family". That one of the neighbourhoods bears the name "Şeker" (Sugar) shows how closely the district and the factory are intertwined.

Pulp, Molasses and Livestock

The factory's by-products have created a new line of business in the district. The governorate writes that pulp and molasses, along with residues such as beet tails and leaves, have rapidly developed livestock raising, especially fattening, in the district. Wet pulp leaving the factory is distributed directly to farmers as animal feed; the Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives the amount as about 193 thousand tonnes, an older promotional text says 200 thousand tonnes. The dried molasses-pulp plant, which mixes molasses with wet pulp and dries and pelletises it, produces separately.

The next link in the chain was the founding in 1976 of a meat combine belonging to the Meat and Fish Authority, which was privatised in 1995 and sold to the Amasya Beet Growers' Cooperative. The feed industry also grew in the same area. Kozlu Yem, which began production in 1998, works on 120 thousand square metres of land, 30 thousand of them under cover, with a capacity of 920 tonnes a day. The district also has three flour mills, two feed mills, and plants producing marble, paving stone, plastics and textiles. Dağcılar Kabin Sanayi makes tractor safety cabs, combine harvester cabs, trailers and beet-loading buckets for the needs of local farmers. At the end of this chain Suluova has become a district also known for fattening livestock.

Molasses is the raw material of the ethyl alcohol plant. The plant was designed by the Swedish firm Chematur and built with Alfa-Laval and Turkish firms. Its foundation was laid on 9 July 1994, and it was commissioned on 3 December 1996 by Turkish engineers together with a technical team from Sweden and India. The plant consists of fermentation, distillation, vinasse concentration and potassium sulphate separation units. The liquid coming out of fermentation, containing 5 to 7 per cent alcohol by volume, is called mash. The mash is passed through a five-stage fractional distillation column, the alcohol strength is raised step by step, and pure alcohol of at least 96 per cent by volume is obtained. The very dirty liquid discharged from the foot of the column is called vinasse (şilempe); this waste is processed separately and turned into concentrated vinasse and potassium sulphate. The Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry writes that the plant can process 200 tonnes of molasses a day and produce 60 thousand litres of ethyl alcohol; an older promotional text gives an annual capacity of 40 thousand tonnes of molasses and 10 million litres.

Privatisation and the Cooperative Era

Until 1991 the factory was managed by the Turkish Sugar Factories even though it was a private joint-stock company. In 1991 it became the first sugar factory to privatise its management completely. According to academic studies, in this process it entered the Pankobirlik umbrella together with the Konya and Kayseri factories. The founding story of Pankobirlik belongs to the same framework: after the Cooperatives Law no. 1163 was adopted in 1969, the beet growers' cooperatives moved to form an apex union, took the Raiffeisen model as their basis, and Pankobirlik was founded on 31 March 1972. It is argued that the leading role of the Turkish Sugar Factories, and its administrative and financial support, were also effective at the founding. Today Amasya is counted among the cooperative sugar factories of Pankobirlik.

This period did not pass easily. The governorate explains that the economic crisis beginning after 1975 and the free-market economy after 1980 led to the privatisation of Amasya Sugar and the Meat and Fish Authority, the inability of the coal enterprises to withstand foreign competition and a crisis in livestock raising, so that job opportunities shrank and population growth slowed. While the 1960, 1970 and 1975 censuses show rapid population growth in the district centre, this picture reversed after 1975.

In an academic article on Pankobirlik, one interviewee says that in Amasya at one time the bank seized the factory's revenues because its debts could not be paid, that the factory could not produce sugar for a year, and that most of the tradesmen in the city fell into difficulty. This is the account of a single interviewee and could not be verified because no date or detail is given. Another interviewee in the same article points to the Amasya, Konya and Kayseri factories as examples where no trouble arises between management and workers.

The Factory Today

The factory operates today as Amasya Şeker Fabrikası A.Ş. With investments made after 1991 its capacity was raised to 5,500 tonnes a day, and an automatic sampling and analysis laboratory was set up. The Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives annual beet processing as 550 thousand tonnes, crystal sugar production as about 65 thousand tonnes and molasses production as 25 thousand tonnes a year; 891 people work at the factory and 251 in the affiliated region, 1,142 in all. An older promotional text gives 600 thousand tonnes of beet and 75 thousand tonnes of sugar, and writes that 1,366 people work at the factory, seasonal and short-term contract workers included. The figures vary by source and by year. The same promotional text gives the sugar content of beet as 15 tonnes per hundred and the sugar yield as 12.3 tonnes.

In 2022 Anadolu Agency wrote that the factory slices 6 thousand tonnes of beet a day and has an annual sugar quota of 81 thousand tonnes. These figures change from year to year, and the current position should be followed from the factory's own announcements. In 2025 the 72nd beet purchase campaign began with a ceremony on 3 October. According to reports, last year 66,570 tonnes of sugar, 155 thousand tonnes of wet pulp and 36 thousand tonnes of molasses were produced; for the new season, farmers who sowed beet on 90 thousand decares are planned to deliver 700 thousand tonnes. It was also said at the same ceremony that production had been adversely affected by drought and frost.

Suluova's economy is not tied to sugar alone today. According to the governorate, of the district's 516 thousand decares of surface area, 276,370 decares are farmland and 170,820 of these are irrigated. Irrigation relies on the Tersakan stream and the Yedikır Dam. The Tersakan is the district's most important watercourse and joins the Yeşilırmak at Amasya; the Yedikır Dam was built for irrigation, and its surroundings are protected as the Yedikuğular Bird Paradise. The Derinöz Dam is also used to irrigate parts of the Ladik Plain and the Suluova Plain. According to the governorate, the growth of beet farming depends both on the factory and on this irrigation system. The records of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry show that the small industrial estate that opened in 1995 has 185 workshops and businesses, is run by a cooperative and has 171 partners.

Visiting and Getting There

The factory is a production plant and is not arranged as a museum. Those who wish to visit should learn the entry conditions from the factory itself. The campaign period runs roughly from late September to early winter; in these months the plain is busy with trucks loaded with beet.

The district centre is about 25 km from Amasya. Suluova lies on the Samsun-Sivas highway and railway line, about 18 km from Merzifon and about 100 km from Samsun. There are two railway stations within the district boundaries. Besides the factory, stops around Suluova include the Yedikuğular Bird Paradise, the Derinöz Dam and the Tomb of Gani Baba.

Chronology

1101: Seljuks and Danishmendids fight a Crusader army around Suluova (governorate account).

1402: Çelebi Mehmed defeats Kara Devlet Şah near Suluova (governorate account).

1902: Becomes a sub-district under the name Suluca.

1946: Takes the name "Suluova".

1950: Tractors are distributed to farmers with Marshall Plan aid; the marshes begin to be drained.

1951: The Amasya Beet Growers' Cooperative is founded.

13 September 1953: The foundation of the factory is laid.

11 September 1954: The factory is put into operation.

1957: Suluova becomes a district.

1965 and 1968: Daily capacity is raised to 2,400 and then 4,800 tonnes.

1972: Pankobirlik is founded.

1976: The foundation of the meat combine of the Meat and Fish Authority is laid.

1991: The factory's management is fully privatised.

1994 and 1996: The foundation of the ethyl alcohol plant is laid, and the plant begins production.

2025: The 72nd beet purchase campaign begins.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Çiçek, Ö. and Acar, O. K., "Türkiye'de Üretici Kooperatiflerinin Yakın Geleceğini Tartışırken Şeker Fabrikası Özelleştirmeleri: Pankobirlik Örneği", Fiscaoeconomia, 3(2), 2019

Official sources

  • Suluova District Governorate, "İlçemiz ve Tarihi" and "İlçemizde Tarım" pages, suluova.gov.tr suluova.gov.tr

Other sources

  • Suluova Chamber of Commerce and Industry, "Şeker Fabrikası" (Industry section), suluovatso.org.tr suluovatso.org.tr
  • Amasya Şeker Fabrikası A.Ş., corporate introduction page, amasyaseker.com.tr
  • "Amasya Şeker Fabrikası" and "Suluova" (blog compilations), amasya-abdulhalim.blogspot.com, 2007 amasya-abdulhalim.blogspot.com
  • Amasya Beet Growers' Cooperative, "Tarihçe", amasyapancar.com.tr amasyapancar.com.tr
  • "Türkiye Şeker Fabrikaları", Wikipedia
  • "Amasya'da Sanayi ve Gelişimi", Şehzadeler Şehri Amasya, 2011
  • Republic of Türkiye Amasya Governorate, news item "71. Dönem Pancar Alım Kampanyası"
  • Anadolu Agency, "Şeker pancarının tarladan sofraya zahmetli yolculuğu", 10 December 2022
  • Objektif Amasya, reports on the 72nd campaign, 3 October 2025

Online sources