GERING, Neb.—The Legacy of the Plains Museum will present the process of blocking and thinning sugarbeet seedlings Saturday, June 14.
The crop demonstration will be from 10 a.m. to noon and the public can watch volunteers perform the backbreaking agricultural task that has been obsolete for decades.
Sugarbeets will be the crop demonstrated at the LPM 2014 Harvest Festival, so a plot of beets was planted with an historically accurate planting rate and non-segmented seed.
The germination rate of sugarbeet seeds was not high in the past, so the seed spacing in the rows was set to ensure that enough plants would sprout to create a good stand. There was an additional challenge created by the way sugarbeet plants produced seed.
To improve yield, the field would have to be laboriously blocked and thinned by hand when the plants were about 2 to 3 inches tall. One person would use a long-handled hoe to cut the continuous row of seedlings into “blocks,” and a second person, usually on hands and knees, would use a short-handled hoe to thin the cluster of seedlings down to a single plant.
The development of mechanical thinners and segmented sugarbeet seed, in which only a single plant sprouted from a seed ball, drastically reduced the amount of labor needed to block and thin sugarbeets.
Source: www.starherald.com