…on the other side of the field, this MONSTER is devouring sugarbeets.

My father-in-law used to dig them out individually with a spade just after the war, and it’s not too long ago – maybe 20 years – that I’d be press-ganged into walking behind the tractor, retrieving the ones that the fairly primitive harvester would miss.

This machine’s a real boys’ toy.

First a rotating blade decapitates the beet and mulches the foliage.

Next, fangs that would put a Tyrannosaurus Rex to shame dig up the beets and deposit them on a grid to  shake off the soil.

Then they get whipped up in a bucket cage to the top of the machine and get distributed via an Archimedes screw into the hopper.

And the coolest thing is that the driver can offset his air-conditioned cab so that the hopper’s not trampling over the next row of beets