Orson Clark-11/30/81 - Pg 19

Interviewer: Sugar beets have been consistent and I guess one of the best money makers for farmers. Were most of your workers Spanish who would work the sugar beets?

Orson Clark: Quite a lot thinning and the like.

Interviewer: I worked sugar beets. That's some of the hardest work I've ever done in my life, thinning and blocking sugar beets with a short handled hoe.

Orson Clark: It wouldn't hurt you to help harvest a sugar beet crop now. They never touch them.

Interviewer: I know they use machinery now. You don't have to block and thin anymore. There is only one plant per seed now isn't it? They have got the segmented seed.

Orson Clark: They do have a man go through and thin a little and pick up any weeds that have got by.

Interviewer: What were the greatest changes you saw in agriculture while you were living there?

Orson Clark: There wasn't too much change until after we left. The ways of raising and marketing changed. When we went up there, in harvesting potatoes they would go through the digger and dig them and leave them right on the ground. Then they would go along and pick them up in the bags. Then they would have to haul the bags up onto the truck and take them in. But now days with your potatoes they go in and kill the vines and then just come along with a digger that digs them, elevates them right up, and puts them into the truck. The truck pulls over and backs into the cellar and the revolving bottom just rolls them out into a box affair with a chain. They stack them up there clear to the ceiling in those big warehouses.

Interviewer: They were bruised potatoes?

Orson Clark: No. Our son-in-law is over in the Aberdeen District. He raises about three to four hundred acres of potatoes. The same with sugar beets and wheat.

Interviewer: What kind of wheat does he grow? Was it spring wheat or winter wheat?

Orson Clark: He worked with the experiment people there at first. He got on to these new types of grain. It is wheat that will produce one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five bushels to the acre. It's just solid heads. They have introduced that and I know that this last year he raised another kind that they have just got.

Interviewer: Did you grow much wheat up there?