Needing a bit of cash after a few months of traveling the US, I caught wind of an opportunity to make a quick buck from an obscure forum post somewhere. I was already in Oregon so we made a couple of emails and hitched up the trailer eastbound towards Sidney, Montana.

The job was for a laborer position on a sugar beet piling yard just across the border in Fairview, North Dakota. The company said the shifts were 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 88 hours per week until the harvest ends. I could pick day shift or night shit. I chose night shift so that I could be with the younger people.

Basically, the beets get dug up from the farms by machine and throw into trucks. The trucks drive the earth and beets to our piling machines. These machines seporate the beets which go into giant piles from the dirt which goes back into the trucks and back out to the farm fields.

There are several jobs. Sample taker, machine operator, bobcat drivers, fontend loader drivers, truck drivers, and foreman. I was doing mostly grunt work but a lot of it was fun because of the people I got to work with.

Above is an example of a very large beet. It is over 20 pounds and gets rejected by the piler.

The first photo above is the elusive red beet. Supposedly if you see one you are lucky. Even after endless genetic modifications, there is still a red-beet genetic that shows up something like one per million. On the right was a poor soul who fell asleep inside the 'sugar shack'. Noted, don't fall asleep in the sugar shack.

There is always time to play.