Good beet year for Belgians and French

It will be a good beet year not only in the Netherlands, but also south of us. France and Belgium achieve above-average yields.

The French cooperative Tereos started its beet campaign Friday, September 8. It expects to process more than 20 million tons of beets. That means a production growth of 30%. The campaign should be completed in approximately 140 days. The growth is a result of the larger acreage, but also of the high yields. Tereos expects these 8% to be above the 5-year average.  

Long campaign
The Belgian Raffinerie Tirlemontoise will restart its factories in Tienen and Longchamps on Tuesday 12 September. The beet processor expects a long campaign and a high yield. Last year the campaign lasted 92 days, but this year Tiense expects more than 130 days.

High grades
The long campaign is a result of the high yield of the sugar beet. The results of the sampling on September 4 show a sugar percentage of 17,11. That is 1% more than the measurement of August 21. The average sugar yield is 16 tons per hectare. 

Similar figures are obtained from Iscal Sugar's samples: 16,17% sugar with a sugar yield of 14.54 tons per hectare.

Yield increases daily
According to Tiense, virtually no plots have been lost due to drought or rain. After favorable growing conditions in recent weeks, the daily increase in sugar yield per hectare and per day remains very high, averaging about 196 kilos per hectare per day. This increase is the result of both an increase in carrot yield and an increase in sugar content.

At the moment, the measured sugar yield per hectare in each sugar factory is higher than the average of the last 5 years (12.213 kilos of sugar per hectare for de-headed beets). Incidentally, behind these averages are regional differences and differences between parcels, which are sometimes very large.

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