Beta vulgaris, including the crops of sugar beets, table beets and chard, produce over one billion dollars of revenue in the United States annually. Besides being economically impactful, sugar beets account for 55% of the sugar in the United States. Despite its importance, information regarding the genetic diversity of Beta vulgaris including disease resistance genes, gene copy number variation, and chromosome structure variation is lacking. This research worked towards understanding genetic diversity at a population level by constructing genome assemblies of 79 long-standing populations— each population’s sequencing reaction contained a sample of 25 individuals. A variety of methods can be used to construct genome assemblies from raw sequence reads. This research found that normalizing raw reads to remove repetitive sequences before creating assemblies leads to better final genome assemblies. Of the three assembly programs tested, ABySS, SOAP de Novo, and SPAdes, SPAdes worked the best for assembling data from pooled populations, in part due to the fact that the program can use multiple k-mer lengths, including relatively large k-mers. The final genome assemblies from pooled population sequences capture, on average, 91% of expected conserved genes. The differences between complete and fragmented genes suggests increased heterozygosity within some populations.