The beet campaign

Sugar beet is one of the most important local cash crops, thriving as it does in a temperate climate and on sandy loams, and the ‘campaign’ – that is, the business of harvesting and then transporting the beets to the processing plant – is starting in earnest about now. It will last for roughly five months.

The humble beet is at the centre of a large and hi-tech industry. Langham’s crop is processed at British Sugar’s Wissington Beet Factory, south of King’s Lynn; British Sugar is the sole processor of the British beet harvest, every year turning about 8 million tonnes of sugar beet into 1.2 million tonnes of sugar.

 

The sugar is sucrose, chemically identical to that derived from sugar cane. Depending on the variety and growing conditions, the ‘pol’, or sugar content of a beet, varies between 12% and 21%. Water accounts for about three-quarters of the gross weight. What is left over is a pulp used for animal feed and to make fertilisers, the latter marketed by British Sugar as TOPSOIL and LimeX. Non-sugar content is also burned by them to provide enough electricity to heat 120,000 homes. And a new plant at Wissington, the first in the UK, also produces bioethanol.

The sugar beet is a cultivar of the common beet, Beta vulgaris L., whose potential as a source of sugar attracted the attention of plant-breeders in the eighteenth century. Since then its sugar content has been steadily increased. Other beet cultivars are chard, beetroot and mangelwurzel, but the sugar beet is the most economically important: the world harvested 253 million tonnes in 2020. The largest producer was Russia, with a harvest of 34 million tonnes. Whether we are doing ourselves a favour by producing all this sucrose is another matter.

Deep ploughing is used to prepare for spring sowing. Sugar beet is a demanding crop and rotation is essential. It may be grown in the same field once every three years, the interim crops being peas, beans or cereals. At one time beets were dug by hand, a backbreaking job. Then mechanisation began, crudely at first:

   

and now with almost incredible sophistication:

The average yield is about 60 tonnes per hectare. Following a poor 2022/3 season, caused by the weather, British Sugar are paying £40 a tonne on 2023/4 contracts, a year-on-year increase of 48%.

Wissington has a large but finite storage capacity and the flow of beets to it must be carefully regulated; the plant operates 24 hours a day during the campaign. The beets may either be taken directly to Wissington or stored in piles called ‘clamps’, typically by the side of a road. Clamped beets are transferred to lorries by means of conveyors. You may have seen this in action: Sands of Hindringham are a prominent local beet-haulier.

It may be irksome to be stuck behind a beet lorry, or to have one’s car dirtied by the mud that inevitably gets on the lanes during the campaign, but even if you don’t concede that sugar beet is all but vital to the local farming community, you surely are not averse to the biscuits or slice of cake that may await you when you finally make it home for tea.