Better Beet Seed.
         Better Revenue.

By: Matt Bewley, AgWeekly

The Red River Valley Sugarbeet Museum in Crookston, Minn., has announced that they will be honoring several generations of the Green family of St. Thomas, N.D. for its “distinguished and continued service to the sugar beet industry.”

This is the fifth year the museum has recognized a local family that has, for multiple generations, supported the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley. Previous recipient families were chosen out of the Crookston factory district.

“This year, we decided to start recognizing families from other factory districts,” says museum president Allen Dragseth. “The Greens are from the Drayton (N.D.) factory district.”

The Green family will be honored at the annual Sugarbeet Museum Harvest Festival on Sept. 13.

Pioneer beet growers

Manvel Green is glad to see the early sugar beet growers recognized.

“I am pleased that they are honoring some of the pioneer beet growers because of all of those who struggled through the 1920s and ’30s and ’40s,” he says. “Back then, there was a lot of hard work connected with growing a crop of sugar beets.”

His grandfather, Robert, homesteaded the family farm in the late 1880s, arriving in St. Thomas from eastern Ontario. His son, George — Manvel’s father — wanted to try growing a sugar beet crop.

“My grandfather owned the farm at the time.” Manvel says. “He was not very receptive to the idea of growing sugar beets, but my father was. He brought in his first crop of sugar beets in 1928.”

George continued raising the crop each year and, in the 1940s, became active in the St. Thomas Sugarbeet Growers Association, which eventually grew into the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association. It was those early proponents that kept sugar beets going in the valley, he says.

“In order to keep the industry viable, they had to watch the administrators in Washington,” Manvel says.

Back then, he says a train trip to Washington took three days. “But some of them did it, and managed to keep the industry alive and even growing slowly.”

His son, Robert, sits on the board of directors of American Crystal Sugar Co., and has served 12 years as president of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association.

His grandson, Nathan, now is farm manager and Manvel has two great-grandsons, Samuel, 3, and 1-month-old Jack.

Harvest festival

Like all good festivals, the Sugarbeet Museum Harvest Festival will kick off with food.

“We’ll start off the day with a roast pork and potato salad dinner, from 11 (a.m.) until we run out of food or until 1 o’clock,” Dragseth says. “We’re just hoping we don’t have all of our help out in the fields combining wheat instead of coming in and helping.”

They will be showing off some of their museum machinery in a parade and will demonstrate how some of them worked.

“We’ve got sugar beets planted on the site that we’ll be lifting with vintage harvesters,” he says. “We’ve got two newly restored harvesters, this year; a one-row Marbeet ‘Midget’ and a one-row John Deere.”

They also will be using a one-row International Harvester and a two-row John Deere and are trying to get a team of horses made available to demonstrate a horse-drawn one-row lifter.

“That’s not nailed down, yet, but we’ll also be thrashing wheat with a Case steam-engine and a vintage thrashing machine,” he says.

Also on display will be the unique two-row “Harvall” that was developed by ACS at its East Grand Forks, Minn., factory in the mid-1940s. This machine has shoes that dug the beets out of the ground so that its two spiked wheels, each about 7 feet tall, could impale the beets and raise them up to spinning discs that cut off the tops.

Free horse-drawn wagon rides and a merry-go-round will be available for the kids.

The festival will run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Festival admission is free, open to the public and will be held at the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Museum at the intersection of Minnesota Highway 2 and Fairfax Ave. in Crookston.