Hi everybody,<br> I just wanted to share my experience working in the sugar beet harvest which should be starting about now in the Red River Valley region. It should be very easy to get a job driving for a grower that'l pay $15-$20 per hour and you don't need a CDL license to do this kind of work.<br> My wife and I took a job initially for a sugar company which paid about $10/hour and they also supplied a space at a local campground for our RV.<br> We worked at a piler which is a huge machine that's out in a large field. Our shift went from 8pm to 8am and it could be pretty rough out there especially when it was raining and cold.<br> I lasted about a week and since I have a class A CDL I started looking for a driving job with a local grower. I got a local phone book from the phone company and got one of the locals who was eager to help us and he went down the list of growers and pointed out the ones who were the best to work for and that would likely still need a driver. In a day I got a job driving a triple axle dump truck and he started me at $17/hour which was much better as well as being able to sit in a nice warm cab through the night (and day). He also offered to let me use the truck to teach my wife to drive and it took about 3 hours for her to get the hang of it. Most people don't realize you don't have to have a CDL license to drive a harvest truck. I do want to point out however that my wife is a very capable person and anyone who doesn't have experience driving a large truck needs to be very mindful of the huge responsibility that this entails.<br> So anyway, they started my wife at $16/hour with another grower and we drove for the duration which was only about a month but a great experience.<br> I believe the starting rate is more like $20/hour if you're there at the beginning of the season and they haven't already hired on most of their drivers. There are also plenty of other crops that are harvested before the sugar beets and I'm sure you could strech this out to at least 3 months if you started earlier in the year.<br> I also want to ad that one of the other growers I contacted said he couldn't use another driver but he could definately use me if I had my own truck. I would get $100/load and would do 9 loads in a shift. I asked Corrie the guy I was driving for and he said he would definitely be able to use me the next year if I had my own truck and said I'd make $900 per 12 hour shift. So if my wife and I each drove for a 12 shift per day that would be $1800 PER DAY. The weather has a big effect on when they can harvest so it wouldn't work out exactly like that but would be close. You can easily buy a suitable tractor for less than $10,000 and it would be around $900/month to rent a dump trailer. Insurance would be around $125/week.<br> I know most people wouldn't pursue getting their own truck but I just wanted to make you all aware of the opportunities that I found and I believe are still available.<br> And also it should be very easy to get a driving job for $15-$20/hour if you go for it right now. I suggest contacting a grower and at least lining up some "interviews" before driving up there. I found a few by looking in the yellow pages on line under sugar beet growers. We were in Ada Minnesota but the harvest is in many of the states around there.<br> Good luck! <br>
Harvest driving jobs
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