Sugar beet look just like a rock:

The first posting of this beet story was done on Jan 25th. You may want to start there to follow the story from the beginning

Yesterday I wrote about the unloading of sugar beets at the Crystal sugar beet factory. After the beets where dumped into a water trough, they made their way via the water into the 1^st building. There the beets where lifted out of the water via a chain system, and mechanically all vines were removed along with rocks that where small enough to drop out.

Obviously if the rock was the size of as a sugar beet it would not drop through the chains, thus they next landed on the “ROCK TABLE”. This rock table was nothing more then a series of long rolling cylinders that formed up a table about 3 feet wide, and 6 feet long. These cylinders were spinning at a high rate so that the beets would head towards a lift station and then off to the cutting knives.

As rocks hit the table, they would make a loud clinking sound. It was the job of 4 people to kneel over this table and listen for the clinks, grab the rocks and toss them into a holding area to be taken away later. This was all done at a high rate of speed.

If we didn’t get the rock, they would travel along with the beets and later end up at the cutting table machine. It doen’t take a rocket launcher to figure out what rocks do to sharp knives.

Now I don’t know if anyone reading this has thought about it, but a rock and a sugar beet look a lot alike in a dimly lit area. Especially if you have highly polished spinning cylinders flashing back at you.

Our normal conversation while do this job would be like this starting with the 1^st/lead person leading off.

Person 1 --- Rock. Damn missed it!
Person 2 --- Rock where? Damn I missed it!
Person 3 --- Why can’t you guys get the 1^st ones? OOPS! Damn!!
Person 4 --- Man guys! Why let them all go by for --- Damn!

Now that was the normal conversation, but one night it changed. You see, that night someone outside decided to toss something into the lift system that normally would not get by the mechanical separation system.

We were working away having our normal chat about rocks, when suddenly the lead person pulled back and yelled SKUNK. Yep I remember I was third in line of the rock picking job, when I looked up and sure as the dickens, the body of a skunk rolled on to the table. That time the conversion was.

Person 1 --- Skunk! Get it!
Person 2 --- Skunk! Where!
Person 3 --- Where the heck did that come from! Grab it!
Person 4 --- Damn! Those guys upstairs ain’t going to like that!

Well it takes about 3 minutes from the time anything leaves the rock table and hits the cutting knives. I can tell you that it took that amount of time, as the four of us looked at each other and wished we all were somewhere else. We just stood there counting down the time.

Soundly we heard this. “OH MY GOD- WHAT the X^%$# is that smell.

Somehow we knew ---- they had located our missing skunk.