Farm & Ranch Guide: North Dakota's Ag Newspaper

Farm & Ranch Guide

HATTON, N.D. - The carrot harvest at the Hutterite Colony at Forest River, N.D., has been taking most of Steve Enger's time for the past couple weeks and the results have paid off, since the harvest is nearing the one-third completed mark. But the days have been long.

“My days during these last couple weeks have started about 4:30 in the morning and lasted until about midnight,” Steve said. “But, it just happened today (Sept. 6) that we weren't delivering any loads to the plant and we quit at 6 o'clock, and went out to visit a neighbor tonight for a change.”

However, the pace will slow in another week or so as the dehydrating plant in Fosston, Minn., will suspend the carrot processing for a short time.

“The plant will be switching over and running some potatoes there in a short time and then they are going to do a little remodeling and make a conversion in their heating system,” Steve said. “They are going to be putting in a new boiler that has the ability to run on methane gas, which will be used for the dehydration. So we are looking into October as a time frame for getting the harvest completed.”

The harvest delay doesn't pose a problem, since the carrots will continue to grow and add sugar content while they wait to be lifted.

“We probably have about 15 acres left on the irrigation half pivot that we have been harvesting now, which should be completed in the next few days and then we will be a third done,” he said.

Steve has also been spending a few days in his farm shop making modifications to his home-made topper equipment, since, with the new row configuration he implemented this year, a couple rows of carrots aren't in the best position for topping and some of the carrots in those two rows are being pulled from the soil, rather than being topped.

Carrots, like sugarbeets, must be topped before lifting. Steve has designed his own topper starting with the basic design of a three-point mounted Crary rotary bean cutter. The cutting discs are mounted on a parallel linkage and his disc spins the opposite direction so the tops are thrown into the depressed area between the raised carrot beds.

The topper takes off just the very tip of the carrots' crown, along with the green tops, but a little adjustment needed to be made for those two rows.

“So I had to go back to my junk pile again,” he explained, “where I had some old discs from a grain drill and I took the bearing out and put a hub on it and then attached it to a hydraulic orbit motor. Now I just have to get the hoses hooked up and change our deflectors a little and it should be ready to go.”

The carrot fields at the Colony haven't seen any rain lately; as a result, Steve had to run the irrigation system on the field he was harvesting. It seems the dry, sandy soil had hardened into lumps and some of those lumps were surviving the trip across the carrot lifter's cleaning chain and making it into the truck with the carrots. Since the dehydrating plant wants the carrots to come in as clean as possible, a pass with the irrigator was necessary to soften up the soil surface and break up the clumps.

Although there hasn't been any rain up at the Colony during the last two weeks, Steve's home base at Hatton has received some rain, with a little over four inches falling in the last month or so, including rain over the Labor Day weekend.

Steve reports the dry edible bean crop is starting to come off, and he thinks the soybean harvest is probably “just around the corner.”

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