THESE photos – researched by Connacht Tribune staff photographer, JOE O’SHAUGNESSY – capture the spirit of the beet harvesting season of 1971 and were taken at the end of October of that year.

While beet growing was an important cash crop for farmers from the opening of the Tuam Sugar Factory in 1934, to its closure in 1986/87, the manual work involved in the harvesting of the crop could be exhausting.

In the earlier years, beet had to be pulled by hand before being stacked in piles across the field. It then had to be crowned – essentially the leaves and head being cut off – before being drawn, normally by horse-and-cart, from the field to the roadside.

Even then, the hard labour wasn’t over, with three to four ‘men’ needed to manually fork the beet into a waiting truck.

The sowing and management of the crop was also labour intensive. Seeds were sown often using a small seeder pulled by a donkey before the tractor mounted seeders came into use by the mid-1960s.

Eight to ten weeks after the spring sowing, the young beet plants had to be thinned [essentially leaving about a 10-inch gap between the single seedlings to grow and expand] – with weeding by hand, once or twice during the growing season, also having to be carried out.

In an article that accompanied those pictures in the November 5th, 1971, edition of the Connacht Tribune, written by V. Foley of the Sugar Company, he noted the arrival of the machines ‘which would take the drudgery out of beet harvesting’.

The ’big one’ was the tractor powered beet harvester which pulled and ‘crowned’ the beet, before filling it into an accompanying trailer. Elevators for loading were also coming into play around that time.

V. Foley, whose job title was Manager Agricultural Services CSE [Comhlacht Siucre Éireann] Teo, noted how from 1967 to 1970, the number of beet growers west of the Shannon had dropped by 1,345, from 3,518 to 2,173.

The beet acreage in the West, had also dropped by about 700 acres during that period, from almost 5,000 acres to just 4,300 acres, while the average area of beet grown by each farmer had risen from 1.42 acres to 2 acres.

“The main problem with beet growing in the past has been its high labour content, but one who looks at the different stages of beet growing and sees what’s available in terms of machinery, will also see that the labour content may not need to be so high,” V. Foley observed.

One of his recommendations was the use of what was called ‘genetic monogerm seed’ which only produced single plants from each seed, as distinct from previous seeds which produced multiple plant with consequent labour issues as regards thinning.

V. Foley also noted that now [1971] over 90% of the beet crop was being sprayed with a ‘pre-emergence weedkiller’. “This again has been a great help to reduce the labour at singling [thinning],” he said.

The increase in the availability of tractor mounted seeder/sprayers in the West was also pointed out in the article, rising from 43 in 1967 to 71 in 1971.  In its peak years, the Tuam Sugar Factory had around 250 permanent employees with another 500 or so employed for the ‘campaign’ – when the beet was processed at the factory from October to Christmas.

While the last campaign ended prematurely in December 1986, the factory officially closed down in January, 1987, and was subsequently demolished – 43 years after it opened in November 1934, at the time heralding a new era in tillage farming for the region.

Since then, the other three sugar factories which had operated in the Republic have also closed down – Thurles, Mallow and Carlow. All sugar is now imported into the country.

Pictured: Powered by a Massey Ferguson Multi Power 65, the beet harvester – with trailer alongside – was a major development in terms of easing the workload of pulling, crowning and loading of beet manually.