Sugar Beets

My dad (Robert Lee DeCoursey) followed in his father’s footsteps in farming for a livelihood.  Over the years many different crops were raised for different reasons (survival and then cash, which equaled survival).  I decided that while I still remember a few things I want to put down my memories of sugar beets.  When I was young, I believe they were the staple crop raised on our farm.  Below is a picture of a beet field.

                                                             (beet field – by sugarproducer.com)

I remember working but mostly hiring others to work in the beet fields hoeing the weeds and thinning the beets.  I am thinking that it was done manually because there wasn’t yet a cultivator that could safely do the job.  Leaving the larger roots of beets which was the crop and thin the plants down to just about a hoe width between them.  (It seems like later there was a machine that would whack swatches out at prescribed intervals for thinning automatically)  When planting the seed you have to plant enough to get a good crop but if you leave them to close together then they can’t grow to the right size to sell.  Being a root crop water, drainage are major factors as well as the fact that they are sugary so would rot easily too.  I believe they also were prone to spider mites and other pests because they were sprayed via crop duster planes at times.  Getting the harvest done with mud, freezing temps and other things also made it difficult for farmers.

After the plant grew to their correct size and they were ready for harvest they would take a beater out which would cut off or beat off the green tops so that the beets were able to be dug out without the extra stuff.  (I don’t remember if the greens just dried up or were picked up or what).  I do remember that after the tops were off we would take beet knives (similar to machete’s with a hook on the end) out in the fields as kids, and pretend we were dentist, I am sure now that it had to eat into the harvest yield, but it was clean fun to clean out the decayed spots and fill them with other pieces of beets. 

The truck would get filled up so full delivering to the sugar factory that at the corner of roads some beets would fall off the trucks.  That meant that we had extra beets at our school bus stop, and we would break them up and skate with them on the bottom of our shoes.

The beet knives that I talked about earlier were supposed to be used to hook and pull up a beet that was left out of the harvest.  The knife part could cut off the top and the hook would give you the ability to pick up and flip the beet into the harvest or truck.

I took the above picture off the internet, but the pictures below are from our farm, our pictures. After the beet tops are cut off the beet harvester comes along and digs and lifts them out of the ground and conveys them up and into the dump truck.

This picture shows them harvesting in a muddy field, so they used a tractor to pull a tractor and left the truck at the end of the rows to fill it up.  One-year Dad tried a big dual tractor set up for a tractor company.  It didn’t work great if I remember correctly.

After filling up the truck, the truck would head over to the sugar factory and wait in line with all the other farmer’s truck to get weighed going in and then on the way out after dumping the beets.  I would be interested to have seen the record keeping since there were not computers available back then to keep the truck number and weights.  Then the farmer had to accept the sugar factory’s tally.

They had to run more that two trucks or the harvester would have to stop and wait until they had a truck to fill up again.

The beets would be stacked at the factory in big mountainous piles for most of the winter while they were processing them into sugar as fast as they could.  At Dad’s funeral I found out before he bought his Dad’s farm he worked at the factory.  He made fudge to test the sugars sweetness.  I remember going on a school field trip to the factory and saw huge machinery.  The best thing was at the end of the tour they gave out these little gray balls that were the BEST bouncing balls you could ever find.  Apparently, they start out as bigger balls that are in big rollers and they help break up of keep the sugar broken up in grains (if I remember right).  I know they came from the process.

The winter months were when the factory would smell strongly of a smell most people don’t like very much.

The last process for the trucks was to dump out the dirt left over and dumped back into the trucks.  In other words, dirt would build up at the factory so they would add back a small pile for the farmers to haul away for them and it would diminish the weight.  I assume they would watch for how clean or dirty the sugar beets were to determine how much dirt to give back.  The trucks would dump it out at the end of the field or side of the road and then head back into the field to fill up and do it again.

I was a little sad when we switched to corn, but the machinery needed, and the season of harvest fit the area better than beets.  I later would see train loads of beets coming in from other parts of Idaho.  There were tons of beets, but they seemed scrawny to what my Dad grew. It was always pheasant season during the beet harvest too.  The men would go hunting because they could count of a few pheasants hiding out in the beet fields.  Before beets the main crops were alfalfa wheat, and field corn to feed the cows and farm animals.  It is interesting to me now to realize that the farm had to keep changing as times and what would bring in the money changed.

After I finished this blog I found this picture of Dave and Karen with an extra-large beet.  I think it was normal to my memory but to have a measuring stick and picture taken bake then it must have been especially big.

I found two more fun pictures of us with beets so I am adding them here in Jan 2020.

 That is Frank James DeCoursey my Granddad.

Below is me carrying around two beets. (Showing the size of the greens this year I think, which made the beets smaller, or I am planning on eating them, I don't know the story)