Centennial by James A. Michener

THE TROUBLE WITH SUGAR BEETS, A MAN COULD NEVER FIND anyone to do the thinning.

For example, Potato Brumbaugh had learned that it was prudent to deep-plow his fields in late October, so that winter snow would water them and winter freezing aerate the compact soil and break up the clods. In March a brisk sequence of disk, harrow and drag would have the land moist, firm, level and ready to seed. And at this point the job looked easy.

Unfortunately, the seed of the beet was both small and unreliable. It would have been all right if Brumbaugh could plant one seed here and another twelve inches down the row, with a reasonable expectation that each would germinate and produce its one-pound beet, but that he could not depend upon, for the seeds were capricious; one would germinate properly and the very next one, alike in every outward aspect and nurtured in identical soil, would not.

So on April 25, when the likelihood of frost had diminished, he had to plant his sugar beets the way a housewife plants radishes: he sowed the seed heavily along the whole length of his rows, using about twenty-four times as many seeds as he really needed. This heavy overplanting was necessary to offset high losses in germinating and the early death of weak plants that did germinate; insects, weather and carelessness could cause losses as high as seventy percent.

On May 26, therefore, he had in his carefully tended rows not one plant every twelve inches, the way he wanted, but a continuous line of young plantlings, eight for every one he intended keeping. If all eight were allowed to mature, they would be so crowded that none would have space or food to produce a usable beet. So he had to do what the housewife did: take a long-handled hoe and chop away seven out of every eight plants, leaving one strong plant to produce its beet.

Blocking and thinning it was called, and tedious work it was, for it required a person to move slowly over the entire field, hour after hour, hacking away at the unwanted plants. No owner had the time to block his whole acreage by himself, for the job had to be done within a brief, specified period, lest the unwanted plants grow so tall that their roots would suck away the nutrition required by the one which had been selected to produce the beet.

A lot of men and women with hoes were needed to block a field properly, and they had to be reliable, for they were required to work fast and to exercise judgment.

"Some farmers block their plants ten inches apart," Brumbaugh instructed the Italian immigrants who appeared by the trainload to work the beets, "but I like mine a little farther apart, about a foot. Keep this stick with you to show how far apart the plants should be."

The Italians were excellent workers, with a sense of soil and a quick comprehension of what Brumbaugh wanted. They understood when he said, "I've been chopping beets so long, I can hack out the unwanted ones with one swipe of the hoe. More better you use two chops. like this."

The Italians worked well, but wouldn't stay on the job. They didn't like transient work or the loneliness of sugar-beet plantations. Time and again a fine crew would spend one spring with Brumbaugh, but come late summer they would hear about the steel mills down in Pueblo and off they would go for work where they could have their own little house in an Italian community with its priest and a good restaurant, and the sugar beets would see them no more.

"Giuseppe," Brumbaugh pleaded with the head of one family, "why can't you stay north with me?"

"Ah, I like to be with the others. Some singing. A priest you can rely on. No, I'm going to Pueblo. " And off he went, leaving Brumbaugh with no one to block his beets, or thin them, or pull and top them at harvest.

German immigrants were arriving in New York about this time, so the beet farmers around Centennial paid the train fare for sixty families, and they were some of the best help Brumbaugh ever had. He enjoyed talking with them in German, even if they did laugh at his Russian pronunciation, but they posed a serious problem: they loved the land, and within two years of arriving at the Brumbaugh farm, they wanted land of their own, and left to grow their own beets.

The next experiment had a more fortunate outcome. at first. Brumbaugh, at his wits' end, proposed to a group of his sugar-beet neighbors, "Why not the Russians? When I lived on the Volga they knew more about sugar beets than anyone. " So the community imported numerous German-Russian families-Emig, Krakel, Frobe, Stumpf, Lebsack, Giesinger, Wenzlaff-and when these sturdy men and women got off the train at Centennial they took one look at the spacious fields and knew intuitively that they had found a permanent home.

They were splendid people, hard workers, thrifty, intelligent. Ten minutes of instruction told them all they required about their new job, and when Brumbaugh saw them whisking down the rows, chopping out unwanted beets with one swipe, he knew he had solved his problem.

Not quite. The Volgadeutsch yearned for land even more than the Germans, and within eighteen months each family had begun to pay installments on a farm of its own, and with sorrow in his big square face Potato Brumbaugh watched them pack up their few belongings and leave.

He was cooperative. When Otto Emig informed him that he was buying the Stupple place, Brumbaugh said, "Karl, that farm's too small to work profitably. You ought to pick up fifty more acres while you can."

"I have no money," Emig said.

"I'll lend you some. I don't want a good farmer like you to start on too small a plot. " In this way he helped some dozen of the Russians get their foothold, hardy men and women with large families who would lend much character to the northern plains. Strasser, Schmick, Wiebe, Grutzler-they all owed their mortgages to Potato Brumbaugh and they were grateful, but still Brumbaugh found himself with no one to block his beets.