It’s time for a sugar beet harvest update. I always know it’s time to do an update when I start getting text messages and emails from people asking how it’s going.
But first, we had complete the final travel leg to the harvest. That included a stop at Itasca State Park in Minnesota which contains the headwaters of the Mississippi.
The Mississippi River has to start somewhere, and this is it. Lake Itasca outflows into a little stream (little at this point) known as the Mississippi.
Finally, we reached East Grand Forks, Minnesota. We arrived on a Monday with the harvest scheduled to start on Thursday. That would give us a few days to get settled in…or so we thought.
We settled into the Red River State Recreation Area campground, our home away from home. The campground is not as full as in previous years. Talking to the park ranger, she told me she usually holds 55 spots for harvest employees. This year she only had 32 spots occupied. I think last year’s horrible experience with the campground getting flooded discouraged a lot of people from returning.
Jim checked in with the farmer when we arrived on Monday and was immediately asked if he could work Tuesday hauling beets to the pilers for the piler crews to train with. Oh, and by the way, because the weather was so excellent (cool and dry), the harvest was going to start a day early. What?!? So much for getting settled in.
Six days later, all the sugar beets (for Jim’s farmer) are out of the ground and at the pilers! Here, I’ll let Jim speak for himself…..
Beets went fantastic! Weather cooperated, if anything it was too dry with extremely dusty conditions. We were running two shifts of 12 hours each (I worked days). After six days we had all 1000 acres in the pile. No lifter breakdowns, a few trucks but those were repaired fairly quickly (except for the truck that one of their full time drivers put into the ditch and rolled the first night, they had to replace that truck), so we really moved. Then the weather started getting too hot. The last day we were hauling they shut our day shift down early because the pilers closed down (beets were too warm to pile), and the night shift started late, but we still got done, all the beets are in. Just in time, the temperatures are going up and they are cutting the piler hours way back. So we got done just in time.
Jim continues to say….
The farmer is desperately short of people, so they asked me to stay as long as I can. So I’m giving them an extra week. I’m hauling soybeans now, and then next I am going to haul some wheat. They are so short that the bosses that I have never seen in a piece of equipment are out there working. The “big boss” was out driving beet trucks with us, and his right hand man was running a truck on night shift. They couldn’t get any other part of the harvest started because of lack of help. Other years they have been harvesting soybeans and beets at the same time. So I’m doing my good deed to help them out. They figure in a week they can have pretty much everything done except for corn and when they are down to a single crop and can put all their people on it they will be OK. Running five combines with 45 foot headers moves a lot of acres per hour. The trucks just have to try and keep up. Which is why they desperately need drivers. Keep those combines rolling!
So that’s it! The beets are in. This harvest was incredibly quick compared to prior years, REALLY REALLY quick, at least for Jim’s crew. As I type this, I can hear other farmer’s trucks rumbling past the campground taking beets to the the pilers. It’s going to be another warm sunny day, so I fully expect the harvest to be shutdown again around noon. That is going to be the weather pattern for the rest of the week, with massive rain heading in at the end of the week. I wish the rest of the farmers luck with the harvest. It really slows down when you can’t harvest 24×7.
I still have five more days of “me time” ahead of me. I have two quilt tops finished already. And there are some geocaches across the river in North Dakota that I think I will seek out.
I know that I didn’t go into detail about how the harvest works. That’s because I did that back in 2016, the first time we were here. If you are curious, these blog posts will tell you how it all works.
Glad to hear that the beets are all harvested. It is nice that Jim is willing to stay around and help out – – I really think he likes to drive those big trucks! Also, thank Jim for his little part in this blog. Nice pattern on your quilt.