Yes the end is near, here in Renville MN. The end of slice! Beet slice that is. Sugar beet slice in particular. This is the last pile. Pile 6, if you care:
Those upright blue barrel-looking things contain fans. When the temperature drops low, like, say, anywhere below 10ºF, they blow cold air through corrugated plastic culverts deep into the pile to keep things nice and cold so the beets will last all the way through winter without heating up and rotting.
Get ready for some horizontal scrolling...long pics are Long:
3/4 view:
Some of the piles were draped with white reflective covering, to deflect the sun's damaging rays. Probably this was more necessary last winter than usual since we didn't get a lot of snow.
Yep. That's all that's left! Should be finished up in less than a week!
This machine (a piler) is used to pile the beets during the fall harvest.
scroll over to the right to see how much of the south end of Pile 6 is gone already. Also, the beet plant. That's where I work. Those tanks are full of beet juice. It's very pungent and if you ever came here you would notice the very distinctive beet smell.
They're chipping away at the noth end too, as shown here. Those stacks of pipelike things are the culverts which were buried under the beets all winter.
Those beets are frozen into a huge solid block. They kept really well last winter. It might not have snowed much, but it stayed cold all through the season.
South face full-on again:
Yes there is some guy walking around on top of the pile. He was even driving around in a little buggy up there! You can almost see it.
Next time you put 6 sugars in your coffee, think of me :)
