Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Brett Nedens, with Al McCormick perched behind him, in the cab of his giant new German beet harvester.
HARDIN — I went down to Hardin Thursday to rendezvous with a trio of bankers from Little Horn State Bank. The four of us then went to see Brett Nedens’ enormous new beet harvester.
The bankers were Andy Rio, president and CEO of LHSB, and ag lenders Al McCormick, Billings branch, and Matt Torske, Hardin branch.
They were going to see Nedens’ monster machine because the bank helped finance its purchase, and it is now the only German-made ROPA Euro Tiger V8-4XL self-propelled harvester in Montana.
I was going because I am a reporter. Rio and McCormick invited me to go along because they also helped finance Last Best News, which required considerably less capital than the purchase of a German beet harvester.
I went because it sounded like news. But let’s face it. Mostly the four of us we were going because inside each of us was a little boy very much wanting to sit in the cab of a 61,000-pound beet-harvesting behemoth.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The new harvester offloads beets into a waiting cart.
Torske didn’t ride in the machine Thursday, but only because he had done so previously. He knows Nedens well, having done farm work for Brett’s father, the late Roger Nedens, during his high school years.
Rio, McCormick and I — one at a time since the cab isn’t that large — all took several runs down the long rows of beets. They would probably agree with me that the best part was when you reached the end of a row and Nedens whipped it around to start in the other direction. The huge machine can turn surprisingly sharply, and with considerable speed.
This was only the fifth day of harvesting with the new machine for 36-year-old Nedens, so his inner boy was quite happy, too, despite what he called “some pretty steep learning curves.”
“It’s really awesome so far,” he said. “I’ve run equipment since I was 8 years old.”
He and his brother, Chris, and mother, Gayle, all run separate farming operations south of Hardin, each with his or her own vehicles and equipment. But the ROPA harvester was such a big investment — about $820,000, counting the cart it is designed to work with — that they all went in on it together.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Brett Nedens keeps an eye on the beets flowing into a waiting cart alongside his harvester.
Nedens was harvesting a 43-acre field Thursday, with nearly 2,100 acres to go.
“We’ve got a lot of these to do,” he said, looking out through the windshield on the harvester’s cab.
Nedens said he has been asked why they decided to make such a big investment in a year when beet prices are relatively low.
“There’s no better time to make your harvest more efficient than when prices are low,” he said.
The ROPA harvester achieves efficiency by being self-propelled, for one thing, eliminating the need for one tractor. The harvester also has a “defoliator drum” attached to the front end, which slices the long-stemmed leaves from the tops of the sugar beets.
It used to be that a defoliator, pulled by another tractor, preceded the harvester into the field. And the old beet diggers had cages that could hold only about four tons of beets. The cage on the ROPA holds 28 to 30 tons, meaning the harvester can stay in almost continual motion.
If a tractor-pulled cart is busy unloading beets into trucks waiting to take them to the Hardin beet dump (from where they’re hauled by bigger trucks to the sugar refinery in Billings), the ROPA machine will continue to fills its own cage until the cart returns.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
Boots, and beets, on the ground.
The harvester has all kinds of sensors that make sure each “scalper” slices off the right amount of each beet’s head, and sensors that keep the vibrating “shoes,” the little steel spades that dig up the beets, excavating in the right spot. ROPA sent a trainer to the farm for a few days to show Nedens and his brother how to operate the harvester.
Right now the beet farmers are in early harvest. It’s too hot to heap the beets into piles for more than a couple of days, so they’re all operating on quotas, harvesting just enough beets to keep the refinery running.
“We’re just feeding the factory fresh beets,” is how Nedens put it.
The regular harvest is scheduled to start Oct. 2, when all the farmers will be pulling every beet out of the ground as quickly as they can. Nedens is looking forward to that.
“That’s why we spent a ton of money on this,” he says. “This really simplifies things.”
