How We Dig Carrots

Carrots are one of our most important crops on our farm and something we’re known for. Each year we grow literally thousands of pounds of carrots for our CSA members, online store, farmers market & whole sale partners. When you’re digging that many carrots every season you need a better, faster and easier way to dig carrots than a simple shovel, broadfork or potato fork. We use a tractor attachment called a bed lifter to make digging our carrots much easier.

The bed lifter is a simple tool overall. It works by digging underneath the depth of the carrots and loosening the soil. This enables us to easily pull the carrots out by their tops for harvest. It greatly increases the amount of carrots we can dig and it’s a lot easier on our backs as well.

There are a couple tricks to using the bed lifter. It needs to be deep enough that we don’t slice off the bottoms of the carrots but not so deep that the carrot cling to tons of dirt and mud. The angle of the cross bar at the bottom needs to be gentle enough to not break the carrots but steep enough to loosen the soil. And the soil conditions need to be right. If it’s too dry the soil breaks apart in huge clods breaking carrots and not greatly improving the speed. Conversely, if it’s too wet we aren’t able to use the bed lifter because we’d either get the tractor stuck or not have enough traction to pull the bed lifter.