Fall Harvest

I was browsing through the pictures that I have scanned reminiscing and found some wonderful pictures. Well, they are wonderful to me and brought back many wonderful memories that I would love to share with my family. But then, well you may just get bored so I will limit myself to a picture here and there.

In Utah, the settlers needed to have cash crops to generate the revenue they needed to build their society. Oats, barley, corn and hay were all generally taken for raising livestock. Wheat of course was a cash crop but many farmers and families used most of what they harvested. They came across Sugar Beets. Most of the worlds sugar comes from sugar cane but sugar beets are also a major source of sugar. In fact, in Minnesota and North Dakota, sugar beet farming is still widely practiced.

Well, back to my story, the Utah farmers (Idaho as well) realized that sugar beets would be an excellent cash crop and they began to cultivate and sell them. The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company was formed and "Sugar Factories" were built throughout Idaho and Utah. Some shells are still visible such as the one in Garfield on I-15 on the way to Rexburg. The remains of the West Jordan factory are still there. I may have taken you by and made you listen to me reminisce.

Sugar beet farming is very labor and machinery intensive. The seeds are very small, have to be thinned (used to be by hand) so the remaining beets will have the room to grow to the proper size, weeded (by hand when we grew them) regularly and then when harvested, the tops have to be removed and the beet dug from the ground.

When I was very young, I would estimate 3-5, I remember using our old Marbeet digger. It dug one row at a time, and topped the beet after it was dug and then conveyed the beet to a hopper that was pulled behind the tractor. When that broke down too many times and we could no longer get parts and we no longer had a tractor it would bolt on to, we stopped digging our own beets and contracted with Elmer Palmer (Uncle Elmer, my mothers brother) to dig our beets. We would work together to get his and our beets dug. He had purchased a new digger that would pull two rows at a time and was all in one unit that was pulled behind the tractor. On the top was a stand next to the conveyor chain that dropped the beets into the hopper where a person could stand and pull weeds, tops and excess dirt from the chain. For many years, this was my assignment. These picture were taken when I was 7 years old. I was in the second grade and had a broken arm. the year was 1963 and we were digging on the field we had designated #1. Can you find me in the last two pictures? (Hint, upper right hand corner). The man driving the tractor was Dave Palmer, Elmer's oldest son, my cousin. Roger was driving the truck. If you click on each picture you can see him and me better.