The roads along the border of Minnesota and North Dakota are scattered with what look like concrete slabs with misplaced fans and farm equipment. But what may look like an eyesore to someone from the city is actually big business for rural communities in this region.

These sites are sugarbeet piling stations. During sugar harvest, farmers run a 24/7 operation of lifting the beets from the ground, placing them in trucks and delivering them to stations where they are weighed and unloaded.

There are more than 30 of these stations in the Red River Valley area I visited. Each site will eventually house about 150,000 tons of sugarbeets piled 20 feet high and 150 feet wide. By the season's first snow, unsightly concrete slabs will become glistening sugar mountains.

And like most mountains, sub-zero temperatures are the norm for beet piles. That's because a frozen beet is less likely to rot, and local sugar processing companies need to pull fresh beets from the pile until early spring to ensure a steady stream of sugar packets and bags are coming off assembly lines.

By the way, that's what the fans are for—they keep air flowing through the piles so the beets don't warm each other up and the freeze can set in.

It's also why sugar farmers seem so frantic this time of year. They wait until the last possible moment to pluck the beets from the ground—just before the freezing temperatures arrive. Wait too long and it's like pulling beets out of a block of ice...start too soon and you'll lose precious beets from the pile.

If your timing is off even a little, it can cost farmers, and the farmer-owned cooperatives that process beet sugar, a lot of money.

So who would be crazy enough to put this kind of pressure on themselves? I went to a farm to find out.

Farmer Steve Williams

Driving up the road to Steve Williams' home in Fisher, Minn., I was immediately struck by the order of the operation. Each row of approximately 300 acres is exactly spaced with straight lines of sugarbeets awaiting harvest.

Nick Sinner, my farm guide, noted that in the coming weeks the beets would continue to grow, increasing the per acre weight by about 5-8 tons. What we were seeing was just the initial operation to open the fields and provide the factories with enough beets to fire up the assembly lines before primary harvest begins.

Steve wasn't always a farmer. When his father passed away in '80s, he inherited the farm and the stress. When I asked him how long he'd been in the business, he said "oh not that long, since 1987." Not a lot of folks can say they've had the same job since 1987.

Despite being "new to the business," he ran a meticulous operation employed with friends and family members.

Steve and his team work 12-16 hour shifts harvesting the beets and taking them to the factory. Since their farm is located closer to a factory than a piling station, they deliver their beets directly to American Crystal Sugar—the cooperative to which Steve belongs.

The truck driver I rode along with, Josh, spends the off-season working construction and living in Washington [state]. But he comes home every year, like most others with roots in the area, for the annual harvest pilgrimage.

Steve drives the beet lifter, and he and Josh work as a single unit. It's a close dance perfected by years of experience and constant communication over an old-fashioned walkie-talkie.

A small screen inside Steve's lifter ensures that he is lined up perfectly in each row as beets are extracted from the ground and dropped in Josh's truck barely a few feet away.

And just like that the 2009 harvest is underway. It's also my cue to get out of town before the snowflakes and wind chill starts to fall.

More: Harvest Series Featuring Wheat