by the giant beet harvester. It's wild how machinery has changed, the picture below shows some of the tools used not so long ago. 1954 90% of the sugarbeets in Skåne were still harvested by hand. Every single beet had to be dug up by hand. That same year a factory named Lilla Harrie started selling a horse pulled beet loosener, with that you could just pull up the beets by hand, a lot easier compared to digging them up. 1958, or so I've been told, a horse hauled leaf cutter was sold, it cut the leaves off the beets, and another horse pulled machine came after, pulling the beets out of the ground, into a drum where they rolled a little clean, then into some sort of bag from which they were dumped on the ground. When you came from the other direction the beets were dumped in the same place. Half a century later the biggest problem with harvesting sugarbeets is drivers falling asleep and crashing into houses, that is bad for the overall profits. That is mighty hard work gone mighty easy work.
Cats like staying clean, no wonder they take an offered chance to get out of the mud when they get one.