Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
at harvest time and the harvest machinery not only harvested the crop as fast as
the plant could mill the beets, but provided so great a daily surplus that the harvest
had to be regulated. (
History
, 9)
This source of labor became so popular among beet growers that it under-
mined the second major strategy that Spreckels and the UC used to address
the labor crisis: mechanization of beet production.
At the onset of U.S. involvement in World War II, it did not take a great
leap of imagination to envision the mechanized production of sugar beets
and realize the advantages that such a system would give Spreckels in its
constant quest to increase beet production. Mechanization had the poten-
tial to shift the balance between sugar beet and vegetable production in
the Salinas Valley by decreasing the costs and confl icts associated with
farm labor for beet growers. Steps toward mechanized production were
already being taken several years before Pearl Harbor. Informal cooperation
on mechanization between the sugar beet industry and the UC began as
early as 1935, with a more formal agreement between the university's
Board of Regents and a committee of industry representatives in 1938
providing $70,000 for research over a three-year period (Spreckels 1938).
Through the late 1930s and into the early 1940s, Spreckels updated growers
on the progress and promise of fully mechanized sugar beet production
through its
Spreckels Sugar Beet Bulletin
.
29
In a 1939 issue, Monterey County
farm advisor A. A. Tavernetti reported on fi eld trials conducted in the
Salinas Valley, trials that tested mechanized methods of thinning sugar
beets. Traditionally, sugar beet growers hired fi eld-workers for intensive
work at two times of the year: in the spring for thinning and weeding
nascent beets, and in the fall for harvesting them. Workers thinned the
beets by hoeing out extra beet plants and weeds just after they emerged
from the ground, leaving an evenly spaced number of single beets in each
row. When the beets were spaced in this way, growers were assured that
individual plants would not compete with each other for nutrients and
water and that each plant would grow as large as possible before the
harvest. Even more important, a row of larger, neatly spaced beets could
be hand-harvested with beet knives easily and quickly (and therefore
cheaply). Thus, this beet-thinning technique was a long-standing practice
in the sugar beet industry.
In Tavernetti's experiments, though, the principle of the “single”—a
solitary beet growing without competition from other beets in the same
