Today is our seventh day here in the Grand Cities; East Grand Forks, Minnesota and Grand Forks, North Dakota, bisected by the Red River. And it’s Day 5 of the Sugar Beet Harvest. And how many beets has Jim driven off the fields? Zero. Nada. Zippo. None.
Sugar Beets apparently need to be harvested in cool weather. The internal temperature of a sugar beet has to be 55 degrees or lower in order for the processing plant to accept it. Any warmer and the beets will start to rot before they can be processed. The harvest happens quickly (14 days) and the beets need to be able to be stockpiled. We had a wonderfully warm weekend, which meant harvest stopped. The farmers and the processing plant were all told to stop. And Jim had no beets to transport to the plant.
Sugar Beet harvesting involves more than you can imagine. Jim and I spent his first down day watching YouTube videos of the process. If you are interested on how beets come out of the ground and end up on your grocery shelf as a bag of sugar, check out this video (click this link if the video doesn’t work for you. https://youtu.be/ksN7h-ZpFWc
As I said, Jim’s job, will be to take the beets from the field to the process plant. We found a driver’s training video put together by American Crystal Sugar, the co-op that owns the plants. click the link. I think I’ll just stay in the RV and let him worry about all the rules. https://youtu.be/iNeHDaQR6FM
So, Days 1, 2, 3 and 4 were too warm. It is now Day 5, and we had an inch of rain last night. Rain on a field means mud. Yup, today the harvest is shut down due to muddy fields and equipment potentially getting stuck.
But all is not lost. Jim DID get to spend two days helping out Sproule Farms (the farm he is working for) disc up a soybean field. He was one happy camper.
Brand new disc that Jim had to pick up first.
Tractor and disc…valued at around $500,000. Yes, a farmer he had just met let him go disc up a field with this equipment. It had GPS controlled steering for the straight-aways. Jim just had to steer at the end of the rows.
What are we doing with all these down days? Well, let’s look at where we are staying. We are at a Minnesota State Park that is right in the heart of downtown East Grand Forks, right on the Red River, adjacent to a greenway, AND inside a dike system. Yes, if the River were to rise, we would be on the wrong side of the dike.
The city of East Grand Forks had a major flood in 1997. A whole Sherlock Park neighborhood was flooded. Afterwards, the Army Core of Engineers designated the neighborhood area to be a flood plain. As a result, FEMA bought all the houses, razed them, and turned the neighborhood into a campground. The original streets and alleys are still here. And that is where we are camping. One of the park rangers lived here as a kid. His favorite campsite is number 35, because that is where his house used to stand.
Sattelite view of our campground, and how we are inside the dike, next to the river and downtown. You can see how the neighborhood was laid out.
Restaurants on the waterfront. You can see the earthen dike to the left, then a brick dike, and then sections that are open. When the water gets high, they use a crane to slip walls into the open areas between the pillars.
The Blue Flame in the distance surrounded by an earthen dike.
Occupying this campground are 53 RVs owned by people here to work the Beet Harvest. A company called Express Employment hires RVers on behalf of the American Crystal Sugar to work at the processing plants. These people are mostly retirees looking to make some extra cash. Their shifts run midnight to noon or noon to midnight. They are a hardy bunch.
Sign welcoming the beet harvest workers.
Express Employment also placed a “Beet Harvest Host” here at the campground to run errands for the RVers, get their mail, walk their dogs, etc etc etc, since they are working such odd and long hours. The host is a fellow RVer named Toni and she just happens to be across the street from us. We introduced ourselves to her and she has been kind enough to include us in some of the social activities that have happened during the down time.
The other night, we had a Low Country Seafood Boil with a group of 15 people. Buddy and Cindy from Georgia had the equipment and brought the ingredients. Yummy!
Buddy, the Low Country Boil chef, and his wife Cindy watching.
Pulling out the corn, potatoes, and sausage so the seafood can go in.
The Red River Greenway that was created inside the dike has 20 miles of bike paths. On one of the days when Jim was able to work, I got my bike out and rode around the north end.
The front of my bike is in Minnesota, the rear is in North Dakota…and all over the Red River.
There are restaurants, a movie theater, and a quilt shop all within VERY easy walking distance of the campground. We walked to the theater and saw the movie Sully last night. I’ve already checked out the quilt shop and will return once my current quilting project is done. There are advantages to camping in the middle of a city.
The weather has turned colder and the rain has moved out. So we are hoping Jim will be able to work tomorrow. His shift now runs 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. In the meantime, the campground has excellent WiFi. We have over the air television (a lot of places we don’t). There are stores galore, not to mention a few geocaches. And I have a long list of things to do. Boredom has not taken over by any means. And hopefully the next post will have some actual Beet Harvest photos!
Below are a few other things sighted this past week with no logical place to put them in this blog post.
We stopped at the geographical center of North America in Rugby, North Dakota. It begged for a photo!
This vehicle passed by in the campground and someone said it was an “Ice House”. I finally figured out they meant Ice Shanty or Fishing Shanty (in Michigan vernacular). Wow, these things have gotten fancy since I lived on a lake. It’s a trailer that will lower to ice level and has holes in the floor you can fish through….along with a bathroom, kitchen, and beds. You can take a closer look at one here.
A sign on the parking lot side of a restaurant. It made us chuckle!
Never a dull moment with you two!!! Glad that Jim was able to do a little something. I’ll look at those videos when I have some “down time.”
Never a dull moment is right. This is just another adventure of sorts!