Sugar beets!

It's sugar-beet processing season here in the Red River Valley. The "campaign" has begun!

During this initial two-week period, roads are filled with large trucks delivering mountains of sugar beets to processing plants. I must see this for myself, you say. Here goes:

Here's a large truck loaded down with beets:

...Moorhead's processing plant:

...and a better look at the really impressively large mountain of beets (click on it for a larger version...):

Where we lived in Maryland, we really weren't connected to agriculture at all. The closest we got was trying to find out the season for soft-shell crabs (for the record, it begins around May, and only lasts a little while). Here, the local paper tracks the sugar beet and other crops carefully, and as a result, I know things like:

• We're getting a bumper crop of sugar beets this year, despite the lack of rain that stunted other area crops. Sugar beets' roots go deep and apparently there was plenty of water down deep this year.
  
  
• Around 3,000 of the region's farmers own the American Crystal Sugar Company cooperatively. They hold each other to strict limits on how much everyone can haul in – if the crop is too good, as it threatened to be this year, they sometimes decide to plow under the excess sugar beets.
  
  
• Sugar beets are a $1 billion crop in this part of the world (eastern Montana to western Minnesota), and that generates another $2 billion in indirect effects.
  
  
• Though sugar beets are processed for months beginning around now, the push to get the beets out of the fields and to the plants is quick and concentrated. The beets sit outside and are, not surprisingly, quite frozen for much of the winter. This seems not to hurt them, and is a quite economical way for the processing plants to store them.
  
  
• Lots of folks take 2 weeks' vacation from their regular jobs to go work in the processing plants. The base hourly wage isn't fantastic, but people work 12-hour shifts, which generates tons of overtime -- and weekend hours pay double.
  
  
• The plume of emissions from the processing plant is quite fragrant, I'm told, though I haven't gotten a really good whiff of it yet. I've been told it smells like popcorn, or maybe a little bit like sulfur. (That's a pretty large range there...) Apparently, the worst place in the Fargo-Moorhead metropolitan area to sample the smell is at the plant itself – I took the kids there this afternoon to check it out, but the tall smokestacks lift the aroma much further away. But when the wind blows just right, downtown Fargo is suffused with the scent. I'll give a full report if I get a really good noseful of it.
  
  
• Sugar beets fall off the trucks all over town. Some of them are barely indistinguishable from the gravel on the side of the road (right). Some of them are fine and clean enough to bring home (below). I'm not sure what we're going to do with this fine sugar beet, however. It's still sitting on the kitchen table.
  
  

For more details on this crop, my friends at the Wikipedia have a comprehensive article on all things sugar beet.