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.

The folks who lived on the hill

Langham sits on the westernmost edge of the Cromer Ridge, which is about 5 km wide and 30 km long, stretching all the way to Mundesley. The Ridge comprises sands, gravels and clays deposited at the edge of successive ice sheets in the Anglian glaciation some 430,000 years ago.

At its heart are moraines – a moraine is defined as ‘a mass of rocks and sediment carried down and deposited by a glacier, typically as ridges at its edges or extremity’. Ice sheets as much as a kilometre thick, some stretching all the way to modern-day Scandinavia, are believed to have ended here more than once, leaving a succession of glacial tills so complex that geologists are still trying to understand them.

The surface of the Ridge is covered with sands and gravels, in some places up to 40 m thick. These are believed to have been deposited by meltwater from the front of the last Anglian ice-sheet. It is almost impossible to imagine the scale and power of the melt from such a huge glacier, or indeed the devastation it left behind: a blank slate, ready to be colonised by living things.

Lichens would have been the first, followed by mosses and fungi, their decaying remains forming a thin soil for low-growing plants. These in turn would attract insects and other animals whose corpses would further fertilise the ground, leading eventually to the sort of ecosystem found here in the Paleolithic: largely forested with, however, tracts of more open country, kept that way by the browsing of herbivores such as the aurochs.

The free-draining strata of the Ridge gave rise to acidic soils and heathy landscapes. Such plants as gorse, heather and pine do well here, and scattered clumps of Scots Pine are a distinctive feature of the local landscape. The heaths at Salthouse and Kelling give some hint of what it may generally have been like on the Ridge during the Stone Age.

Salthouse Heath

Image credit: Evelyn Simak; licence

However, west of the River Glaven the hills are lower and the soils rather more alkaline, since the glacial outwash cut deeper here into the underlying chalk. Especially where they have been enriched by eons of plant growth and decay, neutral soils make for highly productive farming.

Here is a 4.35 km cross-section taken along grid north through Morston and Langham Hall and into the valley of our little tributary of the River Stiffkey. (NB the profile is compressed horizontally, making the hills look much steeper than they are.) Langham Hall is at an elevation of 40 metres and Morston is at sea-level.

The late Mesolithic inhabitants of England were primarily hunter gatherers, probably partly nomadic, but they also practised a form of proto-agriculture, including game management, the propagation and protection of food-bearing plants such as berry-bearing bushes, and a degree of domestication of animals. Wolves of course had already been domesticated as dogs for thousands of years and used in hunting.

One of the strategies used in hunting was to lay an arc of fire upwind, driving the animals and birds towards men waiting downwind. This use of fire had a devastating local effect on the tree-cover, but it was mainly temporary, for the native population was small, and the country remained largely forested.

The Mesolithic natives were supplanted by, or interbred with, stocky Germanic incomers who brought with them a technology that had slowly spread from the Euphrates: organised agriculture. They cleared the land using a technique called ‘slash-and-burn’. Trees were either ring-barked and left to die or cut down with flint-bladed axes. The dead or fallen timber, together with undergrowth such as bracken and holly, was torched during periods of drought.

Initially the minerals in the ashes and the innate richness of the soil provided a decent return on these early farmers’ labours. But they knew little or nothing about fertilisers. After a few seasons the productivity of a field would decline to the point where it wasn’t worth cultivating, and more woodland would have to be burnt.

Thus we can speculate that most of the forest hereabouts would have been permanently destroyed quite early in the Neolithic, at least 5,000 years ago.

The land here would have been highly sought after. It has fertile soil and a salubrious, elevated position – but also access to running fresh water. The Domesday Book records that Langham had a mill, suggesting that what is now a brook may in the recent geological past have been something more. As a bonus, the coast with its seafood lies only a couple of miles away.

These Germanic people, then, were the likely founders of the village of Langham. Their houses were made of wood and stone, caulked with clay and having a conical roof covered in turf, and were clustered together for mutual protection from bears and wolves. Such a village was also likely to have had a meeting house where the elders gathered (plus ça change) to decide on policy.

We might even suppose that the headman’s house occupied the very site of Langham Hall, just about the most favoured and elevated spot for miles around. Whether he would have had a view of Blakeney Point from his doorway is another question, since the shingle spit at that time is likely to have been rudimentary or even non-existent – but that’s a different story altogether.