It’s over, harvest is finally over. There is nothing quite like being done with beets. Most beet farmers would agree that beet harvest is perhaps the biggest undertaking on their farm. You just never know what is going to happen. The weather is always the biggest unknown, it may be to hot, to cold, to wet, it can also be to dry. Machinery may break, somebody usually does something dumb in the field, you never know what is going to happen during beets. This year was perhaps the strangest of years, sure some people did some dumb things, that is to be expected, but the unexpected happened this year, it didn’t rain.
The business end of the beet harvester.
One of the nice things about beets is that once they are in the pile we are done with them. We belong to the American Crystal Sugar Company Coop. The sugar company processes and markets the sugar for us. Marketing is usually the hardest thing a farmer has to do and it is nice to not have to do it with sugarbeets. Also, we don’t have to worry about storage.
Living along the Canadian border, we have a very distinct advantage with sugar beets. That would be storage. We pile them outside on the ground. The beet piles will freeze over winter keeping them fresh for processing. So while most people like a warm winter, I like it to be cold. I like the beets to freeze and store well so the company has a quality product from which to make sugar.
