Klosterman returns from KWS Seeds’ sugarbeet facility in Germany

WYNDMERE, N.D. – After a strong, windy night on Friday, Aug. 8, Carson Klosterman was out driving around the farm, checking to make sure all the crops and the trees in the shelterbelts were not damaged.

“We had some winds come through in the early morning hours on Friday, Aug. 8, and I saw trees down, and some soybeans lodged,” Carson said. “Those soybeans are laying down and now we have the chance for white mold disease to get in there.”

From the road, Carson could see the corn looked fine and he felt the sunflowers were probably fine, as well.

“The corn doesn’t look like it leaned over. I will have to go by some sunflower fields to see if the flowers are leaning or anything like that, but I think they’re pretty green and healthy looking. They should be pretty strong,” he said.

Klosterman said the wind event was “pretty noisy” for a small amount of rain. The farm received about 0.45 inches, nearly half an inch, and the day before, they received 2.5 inches. The last week of July/first of August, they received a little rain again, but they also missed a couple of the other rain showers that came through the area.

The sugarbeets are doing well, and with high humidity this summer, they had the beets aerially sprayed again with fungicide.

“Back at the farm, we had the airplane spray the beets with fungicide because the ground has been so wet,” he said.

Carson’s dad has been spraying some weedy spots in the soybean fields.

“While I was in Germany, Dad managed to spray a couple of soybean fields that had some weedy spots in them,” he said.

Tom and the guys also worked on maintenance and continuing to prepare the sugarbeet equipment for pre-pile, which will happen around Aug. 19, Carson said.

“Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative will have a meeting next week, and all the co-op farmers go to that meeting, and they will get direction for what we call ‘pre-harvest.’ They will split us all into groups and let us know when we’re supposed to go,” he said. “Every grower will bring in two tons of beets for every acre we have planted to sugarbeets. That way, the factory will have just a little bit on hand to get started up and make sure things work.”

Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative will also have autonomous trucks working during the beet harvest. The trucks are currently in a beta-testing program, waiting on legislation to be totally autonomous.

“They’re still doing beta testing, but neither Minnesota nor North Dakota recognize the drive by itself. But we do have the autonomous trucks operating, collecting data, and there is a dummy driver in the passenger seat until legislation is passed to approve it,” he said.

Carson returned in early August from his trip to KWS Seeds, the parent company to ACH sugarbeet seed. He visited the company’s headquarters in Germany. He and the other board members from Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative and Michigan Sugar Cooperative visited headquarters, a research arm of the company, farms and beet equipment and had a couple of walking tours of cities.

“We stopped at two KWS facilities, their headquarters in Einbeck, and a research station out in the country,” he said.

They also took a couple of farm tours. German farms are small with smaller acreage and smaller equipment.

“The reason for that is a lot of that land has been passed on for many generations, so it has been subdivided numerous times,” he said.

Carson pointed out that everywhere they went in the country was very clean. They took a couple of walking tours around some cities.

“We did do a couple of short city walk tours of Einbeck, Nuremberg and Munich. Everything was nice and clean but there were houses on top of houses and everything was pretty congested versus what we have over here in America,” he said. “For dinner, you could have schnitzel in many different ways and spaetzle that was like mac and cheese. Breakfast over there was hard bread and cold lunch meat.”

They took a tour of one of Sudzucker’s sugar facilities in Ochsenfurt, which processes sugarbeets into sugar, syrup, and other products. The facility had modern equipment and was “a little cleaner than our facilities because their campaigns are shorter, which gives them more time to prep,” Carson said.

“They weren’t processing any beets at that time – they usually get done in January or February – so we saw them doing repairs to the facility. They will start the beet campaign here in a couple of months,” he added

The group also toured the Ropa facility located in Sittelsdorf where they build large all-in-one self-propelled sugarbeet harvesters.

“Self-propelled sugarbeet harvesters have their own 700-plus horsepower diesel engine. The harvesters are large in size because there’s a lot going on – they have an attachment on the front end that defoliates the leaves off the beets, pinch wheels or vibrating shears to dig and lift the beet out of the ground and then a series of spinning turbines and chains to get the beets into the large 30-plus-ton tank, which unloads into trucks or carts at the end of the field.