Karbon Kounty Moos

***Don’t forget to click on the photos - they’ll be larger and clearer!***

Hi everyone, this is Pandora from “An Offering of Myself to the World”
and I am very pleased to be today’s guest poster on “KarbonKountyMoos”. In keeping with her blog’s theme I have decided to share a story and pictures about my own “Sugar Beet Baron” who has been out the last week or so planting sugar beets. So here, hopefully, is an educational post.

I am starting off by showing a picture of what a sugar beet seed actually looks like. They are very small in comparison to how large a beet is when they are harvested in October. Beet seed is not naturally blue, it is colored that way to make it easier to find on the ground. I took this picture while I was looking down into the canister on the beet drill.

Here is one beet seed on the ground. I don’t know how easily you can tell the size of the seed from this picture. This seed is laying in the tractor tire tread on the ground. Hopefully that will give you an impression of the size.

This picture shows the outside of the canister which houses the sugar beet seed as it is being planted or drilled into the ground. It is a little difficult to see from this picture but there is a metal piece in between the canisters which is called a ditcher. This makes a ditch in the rows for irrigation.

Here is another shot of the back of our beet drill. You can tell by the number of canisters (6) that we can plant 6 rows at one time.

This shows the rows in which beets are planted. The deepest rows are the rows made by the ditcher. These are the rows which we will use to irrigate later on this spring. The first deep row on the right hand side of the picture is a ditch. The next line (row) has the beet seed planted in it, following that is a line just to space the row. The next line (row) has beet seed planted in it and following that is another ditch. Sugar beets are grown two rows together with ditches to irrigate in between. When the beets get larger their leaves will totally cover the ditches and it is very difficult at times to tell which rows to irrigate.

This picture is the side view of the drill. The large wheel behind the canister (containing beet seed) moves on the ground as the tractor pulls the planter. As the wheel turns it moves the gears underneath the canister which causes a beet seed to be released. This is how the beets are evenly planted in the row.

Here we see the tractor going off down the field. The long arm which is raised up beside the beet drill is a marker arm. There is one on each side of the drill. The one on the opposite side is down, marking a line in the dirt, so when the tractor turns at the end of the field the farmer has a guide to follow. This is how the rows stay nice and straight. When the tractor turns at the end of the field, the marker arms will switch, one goes up while the other goes down, to mark the next rows.

Here is the tractor taking off across the field. By the time my husband is finished; he will have planted 205 acres of sugar beets.

I hope everyone has enjoyed my little explanation of how to plant sugar beets. So the next time you put sugar in your coffee or sprinkle some on your cereal, just think about me, Moos and our Sugar Beets Barons.

Thanks Moos, for letting me have the opportunity to post on your blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2005 at 8:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.