(soft guitar music) - [Allan Dragseth] In 1918, a guy from Michigan moved here, and he'd raised sugar beets and Michigan.

He brought some seed along and he planted in a garden up on the north edge of Crookston.

From there, it's gone to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Red River Valley.

In the first few years, we got a German Russian immigrants that were down in Southern Minnesota.

I understand that came up here and did the work.

Then eventually the company had a recruitment agency down in Texas and they recruited workers to come up here.

The farmers paid a fee to the company to get the workers.

Earliest I remember is somebody would have a truck and they'd build a wooden box on it and cover it with a canvas top and have benches along each side.

Imagine riding on a wooden bench all the way from Texas to Minnesota.

There was thousands of them that came up to the Red River Valley.

(soft guitar music) - [Ken Mendez] My parents didn't tell me a lot about the fields and this makes me wonder how hard they did work.

The older brothers and sisters would always take care of us younger ones on the side of the fields.

That's the length that these families went through, you didn't drop them off at the babysitter.

You didn't call in sick because you had a cold, there was no excuses.

You were in the fields.

My father spoke about seeing posters advertising for workers.

He responded, they came for what they thought would be a better life.

A more secure life.

In 1927 that was the first year to plant, and East Grand Forks was being built and in operation.

So it's kind of amazing to know that my father was one of the first of the families that came up here.

Grapes of wrath took you west.

And the sugar beets brought you north.

- We had farm labor come up in the early seventies.

We had two different families that would come.

We would house them up in Northcote, just a mile and a half away from here.

The family included moms, dads, kids, and the whole gamut.

They'd come up to do weeding and thinning for us in the advance of technology and devices thinning came along and they were primarily used for weeding then.

Then we would run them through our fields, two, three times a year to control the weeds in the sugar beets.

They would put in eight hours or so two o'clock in the afternoon, the peak heating time of the day.

They would quit and go home, but they'd be right back out again the following day.

If it was going to be hot, they would be out there at the crack of dawn.

Tremendous work ethic.

- [Allen Dragseth] The original seed was multi germ seed which meant multiple plants would come up from a single seed and they'd have to crawl along on their hands and knees then thin them out, grab one plant and then with the other hand dig the extra beats away and then crawl ahead a little ways and leave another plant, it was hard work.

They'd use the machete knives like this to pick the beats up off the ground grab them with her left hand, cut the tops off.

And then we'd throw them into that area where the four rows had been.

Then a farmer would come with his beat fork and fork 'em up onto a wagon and they'd haul them to the receiving site and they have to fork them off the wagon again.

They were handled four or five times by hand.

- The biggest thing that took out the migrant working people is the onslaught of Roundup.

That's certainly killed the whole system is the Roundup industry that came in the late eighties, early nineties.

- It's amazing what has happened from when my father came up here when he was 17 to the individual stories now generations later through my own kids.

I have a daughter that has an agronomy major.

I have a son that's an I.T.

major because of the hard work of my mom and my father.

If my dad had any ounce of, I don't want to say fear but in Mexico when he saw that poster if he would have said, no, we wouldn't be here today.

(soft guitar music) - [Narrator] Moving Lives Minnesota Stories of Origin and Immigration is made possible by the state's arts and cultural heritage fund.

And by the members of Prairie public.