| TWIN FALLS -- Leonard Winkle, now a retiree living in Twin
Falls, recalls a time in the mid-50's when farmers in the Mini-Cassia area
were pretty nervous about getting their beets out.
Winkle was a field man for Amalgamated in the Adelaide area west of
Norland. About 1400 acres of sugar beets from his area had frozen in the
field during late November, he said, but fortunately a window of
opportunity opened up five days before Christmas.
"We were so hard pressed to get them out. Finally we got a general
thaw, and we ran solid three days and three nights. We never shut
down," he said. "It was Christmas Eve before we finally got
everything rounded up."
Everybody in the neighborhood ganged up on the work.
"There were two tractors on each digger and topper. And we had
tractors pulling trucks right along side these things," Winkle said.
"The frost and the mud was so thick some days, they just had to dig
the beets and get them later. Then the guys would pick them up with the
front-end loaders on their trucks in order to get the beets to the
factory."
Forty-five years later, friends and neighbors from the same area worked
together to harvest beets frozen in the field during late November. Dave
Elison, an Amalgamated agronomist, said at this point somewhere around
3,000 acres of the 4400 frozen in Mini-Cassia remain in the fields. But as
of a week ago when temperatures dipped again, everyone is waiting for
another window of opportunity.
Leonard Kerbs, Twin Falls ag manager, said of the 900 acres in his
area, about 730 are still frozen in the field. But, he said, even if those
beets stay frozen in the ground until January, farmers might still be able
to harvest.
"Beets remain in a neutral stage when they are frozen," he
said.
Kerbs said in northern states like Minnesota, Michigan and the Dakotas,
sugar beets are placed into storage buildings before winter sets in. Then
when the temperature drops down to zero degrees for about five days, the
fans are turned on and the beets remain frozen sometimes until as late as
June.
"It's a common practice and a good one, or they wouldn't be doing
it," he said. "You know, a frozen beet is hardly respirating.
It's not using up sugar to respirate. It's still alive, so the quality is
the same as when it got frozen."
Kerbs said if farmers can't get into the fields in December, weather
records for Idaho show that typically a thaw sets in during January
sometime around the twelfth. It is key that the thaw is gentle so that the
beets thaw slowly.
"If we get a thaw where everything thaws out at once, it's not
very long before bacterial action starts up and then you start losing
quality," Elison said.
For now everyone waits, watches and worries.
"These guys are watching the whens and the ifs," Elison said.
"It's not done 'til it's done." |