Buckskinner I totally understand you and your brothers situation.
We grew up milking cows, making hay and hoeing weedy sugar beets. My dad was very good at letting us make mistakes and learning from them. It’s something I’m probably not as good at and mistakes have become very expensive.
My dad said we could always come back to the farm, but we had to leave it first and try something else. My dad was a smart man with a lot of common sense. I went to electronics school and after I worked in Detroit for several years. In the spring of 1984 the economy was terrible. Inflation was crazy and the place I worked at was going to have to let someone go. It was me or a guy with a wife and kids. I decided to pack up my meager belongings and go back to the farm.
It was difficult. Interest rates were high. Everything was expensive and when I left the farm they sold the cows. My next youngest brother had taken a job and work off the farm for a few years. Now he was getting married and wanted to come back to the farm. We decided to buy some cows and start milking again. I remember being very nervous about how much money I had to borrow and how high the interest rate was. My dad told me if you don’t have anything, they can’t take anything away from you. That was 38 years ago and I have been I debt ever since. It has been a struggle and the time I spent off the farm made me appreciate my time on the farm enough to stick with it. I have had to sell stuff I couldn’t make the payments on. It hurt and my brother who farmed with me for 35 years decided it was time for him to leave the farm again. We had to sell land and there wasn’t enough left for all of us.
Myself and my middle brother decided to keep trying to make it go. The next couple years were very difficult and very hard on one nerves. We somehow managed to survive them. I said a lot of prayers and asked the good lord to take care of us. Honestly he was the only one who could. He has and we are getting through it.
My dad planted our first sugar beet crop two days before I was born. This spring if my planter works I will plant our 61st crop of sugar beets. Things have certainly changed. Yet stayed the same. We still take those delicate little beets seeds and plant them in the cold moist soil. We still do a lot of praying and worrying.
Last year we had a record year for sugar beet yields. We averaged 44 tons per acre. A whole 10 tons higher than the fantastic crop we grew the year prior. Unfortunately the sugar content was very low. We averaged 16.4% sugar. The year prior we averaged 20.23% sugar. The previous year even though we had over 3,000 less tons. We had over 300,000 more lbs of sugar from them. This still wouldn’t be so terrible except beet are a perishable crop. We can’t just store them in a bin. They go on huge piles and we have to get them processed before the end of spring.
The most we have ever processed as a coop is 5.1 million tons. Last year we estimated we had a 5.8 million ton crop. We left 5% of our crop unharvested, knowing we would never be able to process it. Also knowing we probably should have left another 5 or 7 percent unharvested.
We harvested them though. Hoping for a record slice and hoping the factories could get them processed. We are still very short on employees at our factories with 80 open positions. Covid has made it difficult to keep the ones we have able to come to work with exposures and quarantine.
Instead of having record slice it has been pretty disappointing. Now we are paying to haul beets away and dispose of them. I expect us to discard around a million tons of beets between what we didn’t harvest and what we haul back from the piles. And the amount of sugar we get from the tons we do process is low. Normally we get between 290 to 320 lbs of sugar from a ton. We are averaging 239 lbs.
Kinda like when you have to much zucchini and can’t find a home for it, but a lot more expensive.
We will do it again though and chances are with different results. Hardly ever have the same results two years in a row.
Bjrogg
