HILLSBORO, N.D.—The wheat harvest is wrapped up and now Paul Fossum’s attention turns to the row crops left in the field, with special emphasis paid to the sugarbeets, at least for the next few days, and then the potato crop.
We say just a few days for the sugarbeets, since Paul is in the middle of a few days of early sugarbeet lifting, called pre-pile. This gives beet growers a chance to harvest a few initial acres to get the processing plants up and running. The remainder of the beets will then stay in the field and develop more tonnage and higher sugar content before the overall harvest begins.
“I like to bring in a few beets early, if it works out, just to take a little of the load off at (the regular) harvest time,” Paul said.
The potato crop is now receiving special attention. About half of his potato acreage has received two applications of a desiccant and the remaining acreage will be hit with the second application shortly.
“We felt that if we gave them a second application of desiccant we would have a much better chance of starting to dig potatoes the last week of September,” Paul said. “I really want to get started digging around the 21st in order to hopefully get done before the main beet harvest hits.
“Of course, the weather will make a difference. If the vines are full of life and you have good moisture the potatoes won’t dry down as fast,” he continued.d “But this year we were beginning to run short of moisture and the desiccants have done a really nice job.”
The temperature at the time of digging also plays a role when harvest starts. Since potatoes need cool storage once they are dug, you don’t want to be hauling in potatoes from warm temperature fields.
And temperature isn’t the only thing that needs to be worried about at harvest time. Care is taken throughout the operation from digging the potatoes in the field to cleaning them and storing them in piles in the warehouse.
“We always tell them to imagine the potatoes are eggs,” Paul said. “If you drop them from too far a distance an egg is going to break and the same goes for a potato. By the gentle handling it will minimize the bruising and the skinning and therefore it will help the potatoes store better. We try to do the best we can.”
And those potatoes are handled many times, just in the digging process in the field. In the potato harvest, the crop is run over a series of chains that separates most of the dirt from the tubers, and then those potatoes are dropped gently in a truck before leaving the field and being transported to the potato plant where the spuds go over a number of other conveyors.
“They go through a lot of dropping spots, and each one of those spots, if you are careless and drop them too far, you just add bruising and it all adds up,” Paul said.
This is different from the other crop that grows in the ground on Paul’s farm—the sugarbeet. Although both grow in the ground, the method of harvesting them is completely different. The sugarbeet is basically plucked out of the ground by the lifter wheels. These lifter wheels run in the ground close to the beets and basically pop them out of the ground and gets paddled into the lifter.
Whereas in harvesting potatoes a sharp blade is slipped under the whole hill of potatoes and sometimes as much as a foot of soil goes up the primary lifting chain along with potatoes. If everything works well, the potatoes stay on top and the majority of the dirt falls through the chain and back onto the ground. The potatoes then move on to the next set of chains in the lifter where more of the soil is separated from the potatoes.
“You do run some soil into the beet harvester, but the aggressive grab rolls get rid of so much more soil than the potato harvester does,” Paul explained. “It’s just night and day ... the difference between the way the two crops are taken from the soil.”
Now that the results from some of the pre-pile sugarbeet harvest are known and a few digging trials from the potato fields have been noted, it appears that both crops have the potential to have a fairly good harvest this year, according to Paul.
“I think both of them will be decent,” he said. “The beets, I think, will overall be better than the potatoes, as far as the crop size, just judging off from what I am seeing and what talk I have heard from the neighbors. Most of the beets are over 20 tons per acre already and most of the crop still has another month to grow.
“The potatoes could have used a little bit more rain, but we are hoping we can still have an average to slightly above average crop. But at this time I am hoping for average because we just didn’t get enough rain.”
In our next visit, we will find out why this time of the year is the most stressful for beet and potato growers. This is when the production from each of those crops is very critical to whether both of these high input cost crops will be able to show at least a small profit so they can continue to raise those crops next year.
Source: www.farmandranchguide.com