Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

I've mentioned before the problems the beet farmers are having getting the sugar beets in and now it has come to my attention how much worse it got. Last week on Monday and Tuesday it got really cold and froze the beets. Once the beets freeze like this the farmers have lots of trouble.

The factory now only allows the farmers to pull 1% of their beets on a daily basis since the frozen beets have to go straight to the factory and be processed and storage can't happen. This has slowed harvest to a crawl and while I was in yesterday I was told it would take another 90 days to get all the beets out at the rate it is going. Believe me, that will never happen so some of the crop is going to be lost.

Most of the guys have insurance but that doesn't even cover the costs of the crop so it is a money losing deal for the farmers. On top of that, to keep the sugar beet factory open a few years ago the farmers had to buy the plant and run it themselves. Without all the sugar beets that are contracted the factory is going to lose money too. So not only are the farmers losing money on the beets in the field, they are losing money on the factory too for a double whammy. Damn, it's got to be tough.

Then the equipment dealers and bankers and fertilizer suppliers and all the other assorted business that deal with beet farmers are sweating the situation because they don't know if they are going to get their money or what is going to happen. The trickle down effect of the failure in the beets could run a long ways and it could hurt a lot of people starting with the farmers themselves.

Damn I feel for these guys. We needed the moisture earlier but it sure screwed them up. I sure am glad I am not a beet farmer right now, I would be crying in my beer that's for sure.

Tough times never last, but tough people do. Robert H. Schuller

We took a little drive on Sunday and took some pictures, here is one of them.



I've mentioned the trouble the beet farmers having getting their beets out of the ground. Here you see they are finally able to get them mudded out of the fields. They were working like mad all up and down the valley. Believe me they are fighting the mud, but winning. Taken in the Big Horn Valley on 10/29/2006.

I'm lucky. All it's seems to do lately is rain around here but that doesn't bother me. We are storing moisture in the ground for next year and actually growing a little grass. It's not good for all people though.

Rain could spoil record sugar beet harvest

Seldom does one hear a farmer complain of too much moisture.

"I am," Ralph Amen said Tuesday morning.

With his best-ever crop in the fields and three weeks behind normal harvest, Amen and other sugar beet farmers are getting nervous.

If the beets freeze, it will take the heart out a record crop for the Billings farmer-owned sugar refinery, which celebrated its 100th birthday this spring.
"You can't pile frozen beets," Amen said. "We've got to get 'em out of the ground."

"We need another 10 days to two weeks" of dry weather to finish the harvest, Shirley Michael said as she sat in her dump truck waiting to unload at the Western Sugar Cooperative refinery on the south edge of Billings. "We should have been finished by now."

Since the sugar beet campaign started i have been watching the farmers struggle with the harvest and at this point really feel for them. It would be horrible if they couldn't get their beets out of the ground. The weather forecast is looking good that it might dry up enough for them to get them out of the ground. Yesterday when I was in town I saw some trucks loaded with beets moving through town to the dump. The beets were a little muddy and the trucks were definitely muddy, I hear they are pulling them through the fields with tractors, but they were getting beets out of the ground. Hopefully they can continue.

Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace. Kent Nerburn