How did you find out about the Beet Harvest?
The Sugar Beet Harvest is well advertised on websites that focus on workamping. We discovered the Beet Harvest through the Workampers Facebook page, but have since seen it in Workamper News and Cool Works. If you are interested in workamping, you will probably run across an advertisement for the Beet Harvest sooner or later. |
What was the application process like?
I requested an application at the Sugar Beet Harvest website. It looks like they added an online application this year, as well. We got a phone call after our applications had been reviewed and they asked some questions that would help them evaluate the best positions for us. We got a few more phone calls as the start date approached with information about our campsite, worksite, and start date. When you get to your work location, the orientation process starts with doing tax paperwork and signing release forms. Then, you’ll watch a short safety video and get assigned to an onsite training. Our onsite training was a few days later and took place during daytime hours when we could watch people operating the machines. There were about 50 of us at the training, all who would be working the night shift with us. If you’re ground crew like us, you’ll learn about the beet piler control panel, how to take beet samples, the proper way to shovel beets, and how to be safe around the machine. It’s simple stuff, but I still didn’t feel too confident when I left. Luckily, our first few shifts were short and there weren’t many trucks yet, giving us time to get accustomed to the machine. |
Where was your job site?
Drayton, North Dakota. About thirty miles south of Canada, one hundred miles south of Winnepeg, Manitoba, and a mile from Minnesota, Drayton is a small town in the Red River Valley, one of the flattest expanses on Earth. The area is just mind-bendingly flat. The American Crystal Sugar Company has a beet sugar processing plant here. |
What’s Drayton, North Dakota like?
Flat. The wind blows fairly constantly from one direction to the other, the same direction all day. There are no natural obstacles to block the wind, like a ridge or a hill, so, the wind just keeps blowing. It seems to die down some after the sun goes down, most days, but sometimes it just keeps on all night. Drayton is a small town, and the Beet Harvest is its time to shine. On our second day in town, we walked from our campground on the north end of town to the southern entrance of the town from I-29 in about twenty minutes, taking time along the way to read signs and local histories. We did not encounter any other pedestrians on our journey. There are a couple of bars in town, of which we only visited to buy some beer and vodka to go. The one we stopped at for beer seemed like a good enough place, and we were invited for some sort of potluck dinner starting at five that evening, but as it was nine in the morning after a twelve hour work shift when we were in there, we begged off the invite. The grocery store, JD’s Riverview Market, is a great little store, has all the essentials, and some real gems, such as the locally smoked sausages. We more than filled up on smoked sausage sticks during our time in Drayton. I still crave them! There is a nice park, with a 9-hole golf course skirting it. We would take the dog to the park to play ball in the afternoon before heading to our shift, and saw a foursome playing golf one day. But, that was the only time I saw golfers, and I figure it is on account of the blowing wind. There was also a convenience store about a quarter mile from our campground, and they sold pizza, hamburgers, and highly-caffeinated coffee. |
What did you do in Drayton?
Mostly, we worked. Working at a beet pile for twelve hours straight from 8pm to 8am tends to keep a person occupied and to make a body tired. We would go to the grocery store to get supplies, go the the bar to buy beer, and go the park to play with the dog. For entertainment, we read the local newspapers, and we had a ball! We would plan our escape in the atlas. We slept a good part of the day away, although we never got our sleep schedules normalized, and would only end up sleeping around six or seven hours a day. |
What was the camping situation?
We arrived in the dark after a big rain to a mud pit. The camp hosts had a hard time finding us in their reservations, but it turned out our rig had been thoughtfully moved to a different site where it would be easier for us to get in and out of in the muddy conditions. The next day we found out the shower house was still under construction, which wasn’t a big deal for us because we were fortunate to be equipped with a bathroom. There were a few Porta-Potties throughout the campground from day one, but the shower house still wouldn’t be finished by the time we left. As for the campground, I would never choose to vacation there, but it met our limited needs in our off hours, which were reduced to sleeping, eating, and playing with the dog. Unlike the other Drayton campground, Schumacher Park, our campground was conveniently less than a mile away from the worksite. After working twelve hours overnight, the least amount of driving at the end of a shift the better. One especially gross mistake we made as new trailer owners was not flushing the water spigot before hooking it up to the trailer. Dark brown water spewed out of our kitchen sink, which slowly turned to murky then clear over the course of a day. When we thought we’d flushed it all, the kitchen tap and shower still smelled of sulfur. Because it was our only option, we bathed in the sulfuric water, but never drank from the tap - us or the dog. |
The campground was a recently renovated chunk of beet field about a quarter mile from the sugar beet plant. It was planted with quick growing trees, was a totally new piece of campground, but, it did have full hook-ups, (although I wouldn’t drink the water, even with a filter). But, it was adequate for parking our trailer and living for a few weeks in northern North Dakota. After the harvest started, everyone at the campground was very friendly and helpful, as well as quiet. |
What did you do with your dog?
We left Annie in the trailer. Before arriving, we had anxiety about leaving Annie for twelve hour shifts and seriously considered finding a dog sitter. In the end, we realized we wouldn’t be missed. Annie goes to bed by 8:00 pm every night and can wake up as late as 9:30 am. But no doubt, she was neglected. When we returned at 8:15 am, we would walk the campsite with her to let her get a little exercise. We tried to go to bed by 11:00 am so we could wake up at 5:00 pm and let Annie stretch her legs a little more. Annie loves going on car rides and playing ball, so we would often drive her to Schumacher Park - the other campground for Beet Harvest employees. Schumacher is a recreational area, not a dog park, but we threw the ball to her in the deserted baseball field and walked her around the deserted golf course. On the few days off we had, we took Annie to the dog park in Grafton, a town about 20 miles from Drayton. |
What was your position?
I was chosen to be a boom operator at our first orientation with the piler. My job was to use a remote control to move the “boom,” the long neck of the dinosaur-like beet piling machine. I was supposed to move the boom to the left and to the right as beets piled up. We were piling the beets twenty feet high. |
I mostly worked as a “helper” on ground crew. My job consisted of:
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What was it like working the night shift?
Transitioning to a twelve-hour night shift was not easy. In fact, I would say that the transition was never completed. Our schedule was from 8pm to 8am, every day that the harvest was going. We tried to stay up as late as we could the day before our first scheduled night shift, and tried to sleep during the day before our first shift, but it didn’t work very well. It was only after our first shift was over and we went home in the morning and walked the dog and drank a Bloody Mary that we felt genuinely tired. And we felt tired the rest of the time we were working the harvest. We would get off work, eat, socialize, read the paper, walk Annie, and gradually our eyelids would start to get heavy. I think the longest we slept during the day was six hours straight. It was just hard to make working nights a normal thing. The shift itself was a nightly examination of endurance. Piling beets is not an interesting job, and even less interesting in the cold and dark. We stood outside on a giant concrete pad, holding shovels, a mountain of beets forming in front of us. The wind, of course, blew. It blew dust and the stink of some sort of settling ponds just beyond the beet piling grounds. The beet piler is a machine about the size and shape of a brontosaurus, and it grinds and growls constantly while it digests the beets and spits them out onto the pile. It is loud work. You have to yell to make the guy next to you hear. When the machine is finally shut down during slow periods, the silence is amazing. The constant roar is lulling, especially in the early morning. It is siren-like: I would hear classic rock melodies in its wall of sound. But you must stay alert. As long as beet trucks are coming in to deposit their beets, be on your toes. The ladies and gentlemen operating these trucks have been on the road, from the farm to the piler and back, for hours. They are bleary-eyed and chain-smoking, and you should not trust them. A beet truck weighs several thousand pounds and would have no problem smashing you to not much at all. I’m not saying the drivers are bad, just that they are tired, perhaps high. It is best to keep your eyes open and your feet moving. This also keeps you awake, and warm. I would snow-shovel the mud from the concrete just to keep moving, keep alert, and keep awake. Around six in the morning, the sky begins to lighten. It is a beautiful sign. The shift is ten hours done, two to go. It is also the coldest part of the day, but the emerging light and the knowledge that relief is on the way helped to push us through the rest of the shift. Finally, at about five to eight, the next shift arrives, takes their positions, and you are done. Time to eat, warm up, drink a beer, walk the dog, and hit the hay for a few hours. That was our routine after our shift was complete, and I was amazed by how tired I was after a beer or two. I mean, my eyes could not stay open. So we slept. |
What did you wear?
You will be supplied with safety gear. You must wear your company issued hard hat, reflective vest, and safety glasses. They’ll also offer up dust masks (for the dirt and exhaust) and ear plugs. Wear clothes that you want to ruin. Anything that is exposed to the air will end up black with beet dirt. On one 25-degree night, I was so cold and wore my nice bright green down jacket under my trash overcoat. My bright green cuffs and bright green hood stuck out of my overcoat and turned black from the air - a fine price to pay for staying warm, but I wish I’d had more warm clothes I was willing to dub “work clothes”. On the coldest nights, I wore two layers of leggings with jeans as an over layer, with multiple shirts and coats (like three coats!). On more moderate nights, I was comfortable with long underwear and pants along with a short sleeve and long sleeve shirt and a heavy coat. I always wore work gloves, and on colder nights wore glove liners under them. Another thing to consider, you’re probably going to sweat when shoveling pitchforks full of (GMO?) beets the size of your head. This is welcome exercise for staying warm and alert in the moment, but when you stop, you’ll be standing still in North Dakota in damp clothes in the middle of the night. Remember, fifty degrees with sunshine is different than fifty degrees in the middle of the night. Also, nothing gets in the way of the wind in North Dakota - it just blows. Wear layers and you won’t regret it. |
What and how did you get paid?
The way the pay works:
Express, the agency that does the hiring for the beet harvest, has a hotline phone number to call to check if the shift is going to be working as scheduled. If the weather is looking either too hot, or cold, or rainy, the sugar company may cancel a shift. Your foreman will tell you at the end of your shift to call the hotline to make sure you need to come in. One afternoon, around five pm, I called the hotline to find out if we needed to work. Joy of joys, the shift had been canceled due to rain! We celebrated that evening, although we also tried to stay awake as long as we could so we would not mess up our new sleeping schedule. We managed to keep our eyes open until around four am. We needed the sleep. The next evening, we were back on schedule and standing on the concrete pad at eight. Express offers a couple of payment methods for receiving your paycheck. We opted for direct deposit. They also offer a debit card, into which they deposit your pay. This is convenient if you don’t have a bank account, but I heard that they charge you to check your balance, and there may be other fees. The direct deposit option worked well for us. |
On a scale of 1-10, how hard was it?
Most times a 7. They'll tell you at orientation that if you can get through the first few days things will get easier. And they’re right, but “easier” just means that you’ll fall into the rhythm of the work and understand what you got yourself into, not that staying awake, shoveling pitchforks full of beets, or standing in 20 degree weather in the middle of the night ever actually gets easier. The hardest part for me was staying awake. I scraped mud off the concrete with my shovel constantly and obsessively just to keep my eyes open, but every morning at 3:00 am I hit a wall that no shoveling could save me from. I was literally sleeping with my eyes open on achy, overworked legs. At these times, working was a solid 10 on the hard scale. After a few days, I wised up and started taking my 30-minute lunch at 3:00 am so I could take a nap. I would go to the van, turn on the heat, take off my boots, drink some hot green tea from the thermos, and set my alarm for a 20 minute nap. I would immediately sink into a deep sleep. Then, BAM! I’d wake in a van in the middle of the night in North Dakota next to a beet piler. Waking up was never easy, but napping did help keep me going for another 5 hours. The overnight temperatures ranged anywhere between 25-50 degrees with the coldest part at the end of our shift in the early mornings. Nothing finger warmers and a lot of layers can’t handle, but I was eternally exhausted and the cold felt especially wearing when all I wanted in the world was to crawl under a pile of blankets and go to sleep. As a healthy, young person who worked out most days of the week, I wasn’t expecting the hurt the beet harvest put on my body. My feet, knees, and hips were wrecked. At the end of the shift, I couldn’t stand another minute — except we still had to go home and take poor Annie on a walk! It was hard, but temporary. The work isn’t going to kill you (unless you’re not practicing proper safety measures around the piler, of course!). It is some primal human endurance nonsense. Put in the hours, stay awake, and collect the paycheck. |
Piling beets is not difficult work. The actual mechanics of what you are required to do are not hard. You direct traffic through a machine, cleaning up as you go along. You are not expected to be an expert beet piler, or even to really know much of anything about beet piling. Essentially, the sugar company needs some bodies to help get these beets into a pile once a year, and they will take just about anybody, because it is not that tricky of a job. If the sugar company doesn’t get some able bodies to help with the piling, the beets will in a short time begin to rot and the sugar company loses a lot of money, so they are willing to pay those able bodies to help. That is where you come in. The hard part of beet piling is the hours of monotony required. Standing on a cold, hard concrete pad for twelve hours in the middle of the night is not natural nor enjoyable. Add to that the constant dinosaur roar of the piler just over your head, the threat of rain or snow, speedy, rookie truck drivers working incredibly long hours to bring the beets to the piles, the sheer boredom of the work site when the trucks are not coming, the wind, the dust, the darkness during a night shift, and you begin to get an understanding of what makes piling beets a tough job. There were times in the middle of the morning, with the white noise of the piler going on behind me, when I swear I had hallucinations, both audial and visual. I saw clouds of bats fly out of the mountain of beets in front of me, and I heard songs in the noise. I remember hearing someone yell my name right next to me. I turned and there was no one near me and no one even looking my direction. It was a little unnerving. Standing awake in these conditions all night was difficult, and it felt at times that I could fall asleep standing up. Then a truck would turn into our pile, a welcome sight, as it gave us something to actually do for the next five minutes. On a scale from one to ten, I’d give beet piling a six. The job itself isn’t that hard, but the conditions and realities of the job make it tough. A good mindset, and the knowledge that you’ll be making a pile of money help with the mental and physical difficulties of the the job. |
Would you go back?
Amazingly enough, Angelica and I both agree that we would. We survived it, kept smiles on both of our faces, kept alert, awake, and moving. It was a hell of an experience, although I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it “unbeetable,” as they do. We cleared a decent amount of money in a short amount of time. We have heard that if we do return next year that we will be working day shift, which will definitely make a difference. Also, we will be working in South Dakota just prior to the next harvest, so we will be in the general area. If we had a bunch of money, we would probably not ever consider it, but, as a job, it is not that bad, and the pros outweigh the cons. When we decided to try the Sugar Beet Harvest, we gave ourselves a promise that if it was too tough, unpleasant, or just plain awful, we had permission to quit. I think this is a good rule. At the end of each shift, we would ask each other if we should leave, and each time, we decided to stay. If we go back to the harvest, this rule will be in effect again. No amount of money is worth major suffering. But, while our experience at the harvest was not particularly pleasant, it wasn’t that bad, either. Looking back on it, we smile, amused by the memory of those strange few weeks in October, standing in front of a mountain of beets in the middle of the night. |