Sugar beet harvest was our final harvest for the 2015 crop year. We finished harvesting our sugar beets the last week in October, then went to Colorado to help our family finish theirs. It’s always a great feeling to be done with harvest! it also makes me kind of sad since we now have to wait until spring to get back into the fields. Everything is so brown and not growing.  It’s so much more enjoyable when everything is green and alive! 🙂

We harvest this crop with a sugar beet digger, while our other crops our harvested with a combine.

A defoliator runs in front of the digger and takes the leaves off.  The digger then uses puller wheels to pop the sugar beets out of the ground onto rollers that send them to a ferris wheel. The ferris wheel then carries them around and drops them on an elevator chain. This chain either dumps them into a holding tank on the digger, or dumps them into a truck running next to the digger. A beet cart can also be used which takes the beets to the waiting trucks outside of the field. These carts are extra helpful in muddy conditions. The trucks then take the beets to the piler where they are piled. They are later taken from the piles to the factory and processed into sugar. Here are a few more of my favorite photos from harvest:

This year, sugar beet harvest went pretty smooth. The biggest challenge was having limited hours digging because it was so warm. Our family in Colorado had several snow storms that slowed them down. We were happy to be there to help them finish up. We are so thankful for the successful year we had, and can’t wait until next year!

Here is a video from our beet harvest: https://youtu.be/nk0XMrtDTRE Here is a video from harvest in Colorado: https://youtu.be/e50KgXzF-3Q To see how the sugar beets are produced from the beginning, check out sugar beet production or look at the sugar beet photo gallery.