Mid-September to Mid-October are busy times for the harvest workers. The harvesting, transporting, unloading and sorting start at dawn and often continues until well after sunset.
Potatoes are dug by two digging machines running parallel six rows apart in the field. Each digger will dig 6 rows of potatoes at a time and will windrow all that are dug into the six rows between them.
The harvester digs the undug six rows and collects the windrowed potatoes, making a total of 18 rows of potatoes harvested with each pass of the harvester through the field. The harvester separates the vegetation from the potatoes and loads the waiting potato trucks.
A truck can be loaded with about 36,000 pounds of potatoes in 3 1/2 minutes from a good field.
Three S Ranch farms about 4800 irrigated acres and harvests nearly 880,000 hundred weight of potatoes yearly.