Piling Sugar Beets in October

The harvesting of sugar beets is in full swing in the Red River Valley. Sugar beets are a perennial plant that store their sugar in the beet root the first year. The growing process is then interrupted to take the beet from the soil and extract the sugar, 17 percent, from the root. The farmers are paid on tonnage delivered and sugar content. The farmers in the Red River Valley own the American Crystal Sugar Company as share holders. These shares give them the opportunity to grow beets on their land, one share equals one acre. At harvest time the beets are topped and then they are lifted from the soil and hauled to the piling sites for storage. During the winter months the stored beets are processed at the plants. We are helping at the Kennedy site and will pile 13,500 acres or about 300,000 tons of beets. The site will off load over 1400 straight trucks and semis in a 24 hour period. There are three piling machines at this site and they are a very large machine to handle many trucks over a short period of time. Each truck is weighed in and out, a sample is pulled from 40 percent of the trucks, and the piles continue to grow during the harvest campaign. Each of the three piles is 20 feet high and approximately 200 feet in width and about a quarter of a mile in length. The beets will weigh between 1 and 5 pounds each. The farmers continue to lift beets for piling as long as it is not too muddy. They are also controlled by the internal temperature of the beets which needs to be between 32 degrees and 55 degrees. As the air temperature drops, the toppers need to stay closer to the lifters in the fields as the leafy tops form a canopy over the beet roots and keep them from freezing. There is a processing plant in Drayton, ND, just across the MN and ND border. The beets we are piling will be processed there over the winter and the American Crystal Sugar you purchase at your local grocery store most likely came from the Red River Valley.