Germans from Russia

In the early 1900s, the Great Western Sugar Company began recruiting laborers from outside the South Platte River Valley to accommodate their need for hand work in the sugar beet fields and in the beet sugar factories. The Company’s concern was to secure for the farmers and factories such a supply of cheap labor as would encourage more farmers to raise sugar beets at their contract price. To achieve this goal, the Company resorted to a family system of labor by securing fathers with large families of children. The Great Western Sugar Company assumed that women and children would work the fields.