Our beet harvest finances

We worked the beet harvest, it was interesting work and the money was good.

We worked out of Drayton North Dakota, staying at the RV park they built for the workcampers there. Our piling site was about 11 miles away in Minnesota

Workcampers

The shift was 8pm to 8am and we ran the machines that piled sugar beets, lots and lots of sugar beets. Each pile ended up 250-300' wide, 20' tall and a quarter mile long. Our piling site had three pilers.

Sugar beet piles

I was hired as a foreman & my wife as a piler operator. They wanted me there to train early in August when they started the pre-harvest, I couldn't make it then. We arrived early in Sept so I could train (12+ hr days, 5 days a week).   
The regular harvest people started showing up (25-29 Sept) the week before the harvest was to begin. The harvest was scheduled to start at midnight  (0001) the 1st of October.

The harvest actually started at midnight Friday night/Saturday (30th) morning, a day early due to weather. 
The last truck for us rolled in about 2 am on Tues the 10th of Oct. and we left early (3:30 am) that morning. 
There was no night shift work on Wednesday and I received the call that the harvest was over for the night shift at 3:30 in the afternoon on Thursday the 12th.

We showed up to work for 11 nights in a row.

The finances are tough to be accurate about. I was a foreman, so my hours & pay were different from my wife. 

I had $3500 deposited to my account for the time of the official harvest.
They did withhold income tax for the Fed, North Dakota and Minnesota, plus social security & medicare.

My wife, for the actual beet harvest had $3020 deposited to her account.


I cannot say enough about the people at the harvest. From the bosses on down to the people on the ground guiding the trucks, taking the samples and pushing the spilled dirt & beets out of the way.  

ALL the people I worked with  were great!