PRe Lift

Everyone at the farm is preparing for our sugar beet pre lift that starts next week. Trucks need to be serviced, the lifter and the topper need to be tuned up and drivers need to be lined up. Sugar beet harvest is high time for us as it is a time of high employment on our farm and possibly long hours. Luckily pre lift is short lived and is a time for the processing plant to get the kinks worked out of their system before main harvest in October. 

In pre-lift growers throughout the region are given a set of dates to haul in x amounts of beets based on the number of shares and acres they have.  This takes much man power as we typically have 5 or 6 trucks running, the topper tractor and the lifter tractor. The topper is a defoliator that removes the tops/foliage from the beets preparing them for lifting.   

The tractor pulling the lifter also known as a harvester soon follows. The typical lifter picks the beets out of the ground and sends them through a series of rollers that remove excess dirt and trash from the beets. Roller chain then moves them to the top of the machine where they are conveyed into a truck. After the truck is loaded the beets are delivered to a piler or the plant depending on each producer’s agreement with the coop. I'll be sure to share more on sugar beet harvest as we get into the thick of things!