Sugarbeet Feature Stories

Agriculture and mobility. They’ve fit together, like bread and butter, for generations. It’s hard to imagine one without the other. Now, however, “mobility in ag” has taken on a whole new dimension in this digital technology era with the development of mobile apps designed for the farm. A good case in point within the sugarbeet sector is a mobile harvest data app developed by Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative in concert with Myriad Mobile, a Fargo, N.D.- based developer of mobile applications for businesses. The app, first used during the 2014 harvest, started out by providing real-time access to scale tickets at piling stations.

The scale ticket totals, calculated in net tons by day and by season, could be accessed by Minn-Dak grower/shareholders at any time, thus allowing them to continually monitor (1) quotas during preharvest to ensure they didn’t go above their quota limit, and (2) truck weights during both preharvest and the main harvest to ensure their fleet stayed within the legal road weight limits.

Today’s cultivated sugarbeets are derived from wild species of Beta, and these plants possess a natural characteristic where two or more flowers occur as fused clusters to produce multigerm seedballs. Whenever these seedballs were planted, two or more seedlings emerged (photo at right), generally quite close and often intertwined, resulting in huge labor costs due to the need for extensive thinning of emerging seedlings.
The finding of plants that produced single-germ seeds was an enormous benefit to the sugarbeet industry. Modern agriculture has now become dependent upon single-seeded cultivars and precision planting. This trait is known as monogermity.