Sugar Beets
The high plains roll and flatten, run up into a line of hills along the Missouri, and then flatten again. We are driving the blue roads, the state highways, zigzagging first North then East through the small towns. The farming goes from cattle range and perilously dry hay fields to more and more crops, and more and more water. In some places, I don’t see any new hay bales, only the blackened big rolls of last year’s crop. I also see a lot of fields that look as though they once held cattle, but are now empty, and I imagine that they have had to sell the cattle off. I realize that what I can see from the road is not a statistically good sampling of what is going on, but it doesn’t look good. It must have rained in ND in the last 2 weeks, there is a fine new growth of bright green grass, probably too late for some. We see many abandoned farms and some that are on the edge, swallowed up by agribusiness. The eastern side of ND is full of small ponds and sloughs with ducks and cattails, and there is standing water in the corners of fields, and places where the crops have been drowned. If the drought came here, it is over now. I saw a flock of huge birds, white bodies and black wings wheeling up out of a slough. I wish they were whooping cranes, but they might have been snow geese or even white faced ibis.
Another change is the trees.. Where the buffalo roamed, there are only trees in the bottomlands. Gradually as we go north and east, the geometry of open range becomes rectangles of fields that are edged in trees planted to break the terrible wind and keep the dirt on the fields. Around a house or farmyard, the windbreaks are several lines of different trees, lower shrubs on the leading edge, then taller and taller, and some spruce so that the winds are deflected up and away from the house. A lot o people are rattled and upset by the constant wind here. I don’t mind it, but then seawater runs in my blood and the wind blows on the ocean too. For a farmer, it must feel as thought the wind is pulling the moisture and the topsoil up and carrying it away. At some point, we must have passed into land that would have had trees on it to begin with, but I can’t see now where that would be. That’s a kind of history that is hard to find. Maybe there is a map that shows what the land was like before the white man got out here.
We passed a sign that said continental divide. I thought that was the Atlantic/Pacific divide that runs along the Rockies. But apparently the rivers in this area run north into Hudson’s Bay, not south to the Gulf of Mexico. That is technically the Atlantic, I would have thought. I suppose that it does change the history of the place, making it more of a piece of Canada than other places. Winnipeg is only 90 miles away, and the border is just 30 miles north of here. The 49th parallel is a pretty arbitrary line in the sky after all.
We pulled into Grand Forks and plopped ourselves in the Walmart parking lot. There were a number of other rigs there, come to do the same thing, and the next morning at 8:00 we all walked across the road to the employment company to get signed up and shown a safety video. About half of the people there looked like us, retired RVers looking for a quick buck, the other half looked to be younger, and a little down on their luck, also looking for a quick buck. It is not a big office and we pretty much overwhelmed the staff. The RVers get a free hook up site as part of the pay, but as we are generally older, they have to get a look at us. We had a phone conference earlier, in which the guy said no canes, no walkers, this is hard work, 12 hours of standing in the cold. Apparently people still show up unable to do the work, wishful thinking. Friends of ours from Hart Ranch helped us make this connection and we went through the process and got placed in the same town with them, Drayton ND at the city park campground. We still as of Tues. have not seen the plant nor do we know what our actual job will be.
Some History
A sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L)is a big relative of the red beet, and it is white and can weigh between 2 and 4 pounds
Quoting from Wikipedia:
As early as 1590, the French botanist Olivier de Serres extracted a sweet syrup from beetroot, but the practice did not become common. The Prussian chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf used alcohol to extract sugar from beets (and carrots) in 1747, but his methods did not lend themselves to economical industrial-scale production. His former pupil and successor Franz Carl Achard began selectively breeding sugar beet from the White Silesian fodder beet in 1784. By the beginning of the 19th century, his beet was approximately 5–6% sucrose by weight, compared to around 20% in modern varieties. Under the patronage of Frederick William III of Prussia, he opened the world's first beet sugar factory in 1801, at Cunern in Silesia.
The development of the European beet sugar industry was encouraged by the Napoleonic Wars. In 1807 the British began a blockade of France, preventing the import of cane sugar from the Caribbean, and in 1813, Napoleon instituted a retaliatory embargo. By the end of the wars, over 300 beet sugar mills operated in France and central Europe. The first U.S. beet sugar mill opened in 1838.
To this day, the terms used to describe the processing into sugar are French, more about that later, I hope I can get a chance to see it.
1965
The first sugar beet refinery in North Dakota was established near Drayton
I suspect that the loss of Cuban sugar fields to the US sugar industry had an effect too.
Today in the Red River Valley of the North, we are working for a cooperative of 2,000 farmers who have 430,000 acres under beets which will produce something like 8 million tons of beets. In the field, the beets look lush and green, the leaves much bigger than red beet greens and lacking the distinctive red stem. We see a lot of empty fields, beets already “prepiled”, and in others the machines that pull up, shake off , chop the tops off of the beets and throw them into trucks that are driving alongside. The machines get 6 rows at a time, then the truck goes roaring off to dump and come back for another load. I am used to seeing pretty minimal lanes going into fields, but here they are well graded, packed gravel roads. The drivers get paid by the load so they hustle, and the dirt from the beets is all over the road making it very slippery.
There is a balancing act here that puts the harvesting of this crop into a hectic 2 weeks where 1,000s of people come in to drive truck and pile and then go off to something else afterwards. The beets need to stay in the field until they have as much sucrose in them as possible. Since beets are biennial, they will flower on the second year, and spend the first year storing up energy . The sugar plant can’t process 8 million tons all at once, so the beets are piled up when the weather gets cold enough to keep them from rotting. Eventually they will freeze and stay frozen until needed by the plant. This is the process , the piling up, that we will be working for. I know some of you have an image of me stooped over the beets in the field pulling them one by one and humming Woody Guthrie songs, and although I don’t know what I will be doing, it won’t be that.
I now know that I will be doing sample taking, collecting a 25lb bag of beets from randomly selected loads. I will be standing outside, by one of the 8 big pilers. I will go in on Sat AM and see what this is all really like.
Another change is the trees.. Where the buffalo roamed, there are only trees in the bottomlands. Gradually as we go north and east, the geometry of open range becomes rectangles of fields that are edged in trees planted to break the terrible wind and keep the dirt on the fields. Around a house or farmyard, the windbreaks are several lines of different trees, lower shrubs on the leading edge, then taller and taller, and some spruce so that the winds are deflected up and away from the house. A lot o people are rattled and upset by the constant wind here. I don’t mind it, but then seawater runs in my blood and the wind blows on the ocean too. For a farmer, it must feel as thought the wind is pulling the moisture and the topsoil up and carrying it away. At some point, we must have passed into land that would have had trees on it to begin with, but I can’t see now where that would be. That’s a kind of history that is hard to find. Maybe there is a map that shows what the land was like before the white man got out here.
We passed a sign that said continental divide. I thought that was the Atlantic/Pacific divide that runs along the Rockies. But apparently the rivers in this area run north into Hudson’s Bay, not south to the Gulf of Mexico. That is technically the Atlantic, I would have thought. I suppose that it does change the history of the place, making it more of a piece of Canada than other places. Winnipeg is only 90 miles away, and the border is just 30 miles north of here. The 49th parallel is a pretty arbitrary line in the sky after all.
We pulled into Grand Forks and plopped ourselves in the Walmart parking lot. There were a number of other rigs there, come to do the same thing, and the next morning at 8:00 we all walked across the road to the employment company to get signed up and shown a safety video. About half of the people there looked like us, retired RVers looking for a quick buck, the other half looked to be younger, and a little down on their luck, also looking for a quick buck. It is not a big office and we pretty much overwhelmed the staff. The RVers get a free hook up site as part of the pay, but as we are generally older, they have to get a look at us. We had a phone conference earlier, in which the guy said no canes, no walkers, this is hard work, 12 hours of standing in the cold. Apparently people still show up unable to do the work, wishful thinking. Friends of ours from Hart Ranch helped us make this connection and we went through the process and got placed in the same town with them, Drayton ND at the city park campground. We still as of Tues. have not seen the plant nor do we know what our actual job will be.
Some History
A sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L)is a big relative of the red beet, and it is white and can weigh between 2 and 4 pounds
Quoting from Wikipedia:
As early as 1590, the French botanist Olivier de Serres extracted a sweet syrup from beetroot, but the practice did not become common. The Prussian chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf used alcohol to extract sugar from beets (and carrots) in 1747, but his methods did not lend themselves to economical industrial-scale production. His former pupil and successor Franz Carl Achard began selectively breeding sugar beet from the White Silesian fodder beet in 1784. By the beginning of the 19th century, his beet was approximately 5–6% sucrose by weight, compared to around 20% in modern varieties. Under the patronage of Frederick William III of Prussia, he opened the world's first beet sugar factory in 1801, at Cunern in Silesia.
The development of the European beet sugar industry was encouraged by the Napoleonic Wars. In 1807 the British began a blockade of France, preventing the import of cane sugar from the Caribbean, and in 1813, Napoleon instituted a retaliatory embargo. By the end of the wars, over 300 beet sugar mills operated in France and central Europe. The first U.S. beet sugar mill opened in 1838.
To this day, the terms used to describe the processing into sugar are French, more about that later, I hope I can get a chance to see it.
1965
The first sugar beet refinery in North Dakota was established near Drayton
I suspect that the loss of Cuban sugar fields to the US sugar industry had an effect too.
Today in the Red River Valley of the North, we are working for a cooperative of 2,000 farmers who have 430,000 acres under beets which will produce something like 8 million tons of beets. In the field, the beets look lush and green, the leaves much bigger than red beet greens and lacking the distinctive red stem. We see a lot of empty fields, beets already “prepiled”, and in others the machines that pull up, shake off , chop the tops off of the beets and throw them into trucks that are driving alongside. The machines get 6 rows at a time, then the truck goes roaring off to dump and come back for another load. I am used to seeing pretty minimal lanes going into fields, but here they are well graded, packed gravel roads. The drivers get paid by the load so they hustle, and the dirt from the beets is all over the road making it very slippery.
There is a balancing act here that puts the harvesting of this crop into a hectic 2 weeks where 1,000s of people come in to drive truck and pile and then go off to something else afterwards. The beets need to stay in the field until they have as much sucrose in them as possible. Since beets are biennial, they will flower on the second year, and spend the first year storing up energy . The sugar plant can’t process 8 million tons all at once, so the beets are piled up when the weather gets cold enough to keep them from rotting. Eventually they will freeze and stay frozen until needed by the plant. This is the process , the piling up, that we will be working for. I know some of you have an image of me stooped over the beets in the field pulling them one by one and humming Woody Guthrie songs, and although I don’t know what I will be doing, it won’t be that.
I now know that I will be doing sample taking, collecting a 25lb bag of beets from randomly selected loads. I will be standing outside, by one of the 8 big pilers. I will go in on Sat AM and see what this is all really like.
posted by Thistledown24 at 9:51 AM
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