RANDOLPH, Ohio – April 5, 2018 – In Wahpeton, North Dakota, at the southern end of the Red River Valley, sits 100,000 acres of sugar beet farms – MINN-DAK Farmers Cooperative. The sugar from the plants are extracted and purified into sugar, and then shipped to grocery stores and food manufacturers.

Since 1974, MINN-DAK growers and employees have been working to sweeten the lives of others who they’ve never met. The story begins when the sugar beet plants are defoliated and cleaned off. Then they are piled up at receiving stations, waiting to be transported to the factory by an International or Freightliner truck hauling an East MMX Flatbed Trailer.

MINN-DAK previously used a smaller 45-foot trailer with regular hauling capacity of 80,000 pounds. However, after the State of Minnesota passed the agriculture commodities permit, which allows trailers to haul up to 97,000 pounds, they chose the 53-foot East MMX with the help of their dealer at Wallwork Truck Center, Joel Hought.

The East MMX flatbed trailers, now totaling 19, are equipped with a metal cage to contain the sugar beets when they’re hauled from the stockpiles to the factory. The stockpiles are kept cool with tubes that distribute air throughout the piles. A driver can typically haul seven loads per 12-hour shift when he or she is hauling from the farthest out stockpiles, which are up to 30 miles away. The typical number of loads increases up to 13 loads per 12-hour shift when hauling from the closer piles. To carry the heavy loads, East worked closely to add control valves to operate its fully automatic lift on the fourth axle.

Once to the factory, each trailer is driven onto the wet hopper, it is then tilted to dump the sugar beets. To allow the flatbeds to tip, Darrell Oscarson, transportation supervisor, specs them with extra gussets over the axles. Because the tilting process puts pressure on the axle sides, which can lead to fatigue, the gussets run from the deck to the frame to provide more rigidity to the trailer to alleviate side pressure. East workmanship is of the highest quality that Oscarson has found. 

The beets roll off the trailer side when the mercury switch in an enclosed box engages as the trailer tilts sideways. Since trailers are exposed to temperatures down to -30º, Mercury switches were chosen for the controls. “They’ve got to be responsive with temperature extremes too. One day it may be -30º and the next it may be up to 40º,” said Oscarson.

The automatic switch saves two or three minutes per truckload with MINN-DAK averaging 420 tons an hour or up to 340 loads per day. The process is repeated over and over, 24-hours a day , 7 days a week, up to 9 months out of the year.

MINN-DAK focuses on all details to keep their operation moving forward daily. Before the trailers go out daily, they are inspected like aircraft, inspections go through every bushing and component. 

Decked out with ConMet hubs and a 25,000-pound Intraax suspension from Hendrickson, East engineering spec’d axle perfect positioning. “The first time it rolled out it worked like a charm,” said Oscarson.

After the trailer empties its load into the wet hopper, the beets fall into the flume where water takes them into the washhouse. Stones, topsoil and other foreign materials are removed. After being washed, they’re sliced into thin strips called cossettes. The cossettes are tested for weight and sampled for sugar content and other criteria. The sugar content of sugar beets varies from field to field so sugar beet samples are weighed and tested.

After slicing the beets, the raw juice is extracted from the cossettes. The raw juice is than mingled with milk of lime and carbon dioxide gas produced from the limekiln in carbonation tanks. The carbon dioxide bubbles through the mixture, reacting with the milk of lime to form a calcium carbonate. The non-sugar particles attach themselves to the calcium carbonate and settle to the bottom of the tanks, leaving a clear juice. This juice is boiled in evaporators, forming a thicker juice with the consistency of pancake syrup. After a second filtration to ensure that all non-sugar materials have been removed, the juice is boiled under vacuum and crystals begin to form. The resulting sugar crystal and syrup mix is called massecuite. The massecuite is  than separated by spinning rapidly in a perforated cylindrical basket. The syrup is thrown off and passes through the screen holes. Clean hot water is used to wash the sugar, producing pure white sugar crystals. The damp white sugar crystals are dried, cooled, separated into various sizes of sugar crystals and then stored in a temperature and humidity controlled environment.

MINN-DAK produces up to 3,500,000 pounds of all-natural sugar every day, which is over 2,000 pounds of sugar per minute. The process is completed when sugar is shipped to MINN-DAK’s food manufacturer customers in bulk or packaged form throughout North America.