At midnight, hundreds of sugar beet growers started digging their sweet vegetables and hauling them in as the "stockpile harvest" of American Crystal Sugar Co. opened full blast up and down the Red River Valley.
So, be careful out there.
It means a thousand or more trucks heaped with the rotund beets, rumbling out of fields and roaring off to dump the beets at one of the five processing factories or at 33 outside piling stations.
American Crystal traditionally starts its full-bore harvest Oct. 1, after about a month of "pre-pile harvest" during which the 875 growers dug about 10 percent of their beets to get the factories up and running for the sugar-processing campaign that will last through May.
Two to three weeks
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The harvest of 420,000 acres will take two to three weeks of what can be rather furious activity. Meanwhile, the good weather this week also has farmers out harvesting dry edible beans and just beginning combining soybeans. The sunflower and corn harvests still are a week or two away.
"We certainly hope that everyone, from beet truck drivers to citizens, are all aware of the truck traffic on the road and that everybody obeys the rules of the road and we are able to come through this harvest in a safe, productive manner," said Jeff Schweitzer, spokesman for American Crystal at the company's headquarters in Moorhead.
Only time will tell about the safe part, but the productive part looks likely.
Preliminary indications from the pre-pile harvest are that this year's crop may show a record yield, Schweitzer said. The loads taken in so far indicated a yield of 24 to 26 tons per acre, and the high end of the range would be a record by a half-ton or so.
But actual numbers are a long way from being measured. The grower-owned cooperative with factories in East Grand Forks, Crookston, Moorhead, Drayton and Hillsboro, N.D., takes in 10 million to 11 million tons of beets a year, Schweitzer said.
Possible destruction
The co-op already has alerted growers to set aside 10 percent of their acres for possible destruction, not harvest, because the tonnage might total more than the factories can process before too many beets spoil in the piles by next May. The decision on whether to leave beets in the fields won't be made for about a week.
Meanwhile, in regulated and rotating shifts, the growers were to begin digging full fields of beets just after midnight Tuesday.
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Already by Tuesday afternoon, many growers had lined up their equipment in fields, including trucks, ready to go.
It's typical for each grower to be assigned a 12-hour harvest shift, either day or night, to keep a regular stream of beets hitting the piling stations and the factories in what is a uniquely collective harvest among the many crops in the valley.
The 1,500 or so employees of the five factories who work during the eight-month campaign reported for duty Tuesday.
The price American Crystal growers receive for their beets is never completely settled until a year after harvest, after the sugar has been marketed. But prices typically have run from $40 to $45 a ton, which would garner gross revenues of roughly $1,000 an acre to beet farmers for this crop, based on estimated yields.
What's different this year is that while beets traditionally have been one of the most lucrative crops to raise, several other crops have matched beets' profitability because of historically high prices and good yields, when the lower production costs for, say, wheat and edible beans, are taken into account.
Sugar beets are one of the most expensive crops to grow.
