Rotating sugar beet cleaning rollers - GIF

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Rotating sugar beet cleaning rollers.




Previously:

Beet harvesting knife - photos
Sugar beet harvester - GIF

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I grew up where Crystal Sugar was manufactured from beet sugar. The farming equipment is unique to just this special crop. The planting makes ridge rows, with beet seeds down the center of the crest. Then farm workers thin, and weed the crop with hoes. In 1970, they were paying $1.40 for a one mile row. The beets grow in semi wet clay loam soils, Harvesting uses specialized lifting plows, that raise the row top up into shaker conveyors, in hopes of removing most of the earth. This is loaded onto a dump truck, that drives along side of the beet lifting harvester. Those trucks are driven 24/7 during the fall campaign harvest. Lots of farm trucks, kept rotating driving up to 45 miles one way to the beet processing facility. These facilities are located from Winnepeg CA to South Dakota, along I29/US81. The black earth left after the grasslands were plowed, were perfect for sugar beet production (potatoes, wheat, barley, pinto beans etc.).
In the spring, the rotting waste from the sugar beets was worse then livestock (close to the smell of hog tankage), but it got plowed in.
To prevent too many farmers growing sugar beets, you had to buy the ownership rights into the factory, based on acreage of land.
At the factory when the load was delivered, the beets went through some brush scrubber, and the dirt from that placed back into the dump truck that the beet load came from. That weight was credited to that farm truck account.
It was dangerous driving on the country roads during harvest, as that mud from the trucks being spun off, was thick in places.