Euro Maus speeds up beet loading capacity

It’s the penultimate day of a longer-than-usual sugar beet campaign, one that started in mid-September and finally drew to a close in mid-March.

Juggling mobile phone and radio hand-piece, Europe’s biggest sugar beet haulier Roger Warnes responds to another of the regular and frequent calls he gets from a driver announcing his lorry’s discharged its load and is ready to collect another.

He responds after a brief, thoughtful pause: “Would you go to Manor Farm, Northwold, please,” he says. If it’s a new location for the driver, this quiet, polite but purposeful response will be followed by clear “turn left here, turn right there” directions.

There’s no map to refer to, other than the one Mr Warnes pictures in his head, complete with the whereabouts of his trucks and the precise location of the eight clamps they have been loading from that day.

“It’s fairly quiet today, being close to the end of the campaign,” he says. “Earlier on I’d also have 30 or 40 farmers calling me through the day asking how much beet they should lift and when.

With more than 40 bulk tippers on beet haulage on the busiest days of the week – Friday and Saturday – delivering to British Sugar’s Cantley, Bury St Edmunds and Wissington factories, his is a major logistics exercise by any standard.

Does he find it stressful? “You get used to it; and this is my 47th campaign,” Mr Warnes replies.

Does he get agitated if things don’t go as smoothly as he’d like? “Not really, there’s no point. But I do like my drivers to listen in and keep up with what’s going on; it’s a bit tiresome having to give the same directions to a farm 18 times in a row.”

The operation is often managed while Mr Warnes is at the wheel of one of the Hanomag wheeled loaders he bought in the 1980s. They gave him a significant shift in productivity from the Sanderson forklifts operated previously, and the grab and fore-end loaders that did the job before that.

Roger Warnes manages a fleet of more than 40 bulk tippers on the busiest days of the sugar beet campaign.

There are still half a dozen conventional cleaner-loaders in the operation but loading capacity shifted up to a higher gear five years ago with the purchase of Britain’s first self-propelled sugar beet cleaner-loader.

He now operates three of these £320,000-plus machines, one-third of the total UK population.

The euro-Maus M3 from German beet specialist ROPA replaces the familiar loading shovel and static cleaner-loader with an all-in-one machine that can pick up beet straight from the field headland.

Its hydrostatic transmission and numerous hydraulic drives are powered by tandem pumps mounted on the 299hp Mercedes-Benz diesel engine and there is an automatic pre-heating system that not only gets the oil warmed up ready for action on a cold morning but also warms and clears the cab glass of any condensation, frost or ice.

“There’s also a comprehensive diagnostics system to quickly pinpoint any problems,” points out Nigel Mountain of importer CTM Harpley Engineering. “It includes a facility for on-board weighing and recording, plus GPS location, that may well be used in future for traceability records.”

With a bulk tipper parked beneath its elevator, the euro-Maus creeps its way along the storage clamp, gathering roots on to an 8.7m wide set of 18 rollers that start the cleaning process while channelling the crop to an 80cm wide web conveyor that passes beneath the cab.

From there, the beet move on to a lengthways arrangement of eight spiral cleaning rollers, then a second web that forms part of the 13m reach conveyor assembly.

One of three ROPA self-propelled beet cleaner-loaders operated by Roger Warnes Transport.

This flexible structure can load to either side and across ditches and hedges where necessary. It can also feed beet back in front of the machine when cleaning up a clamp that has been made a little too wide.

“It takes half the time to fill a lorry and does it more gently than a loading shovel digging into a pile of beet and dumping it in to a cleaner-loader hopper,” says Mr Warnes. “The collector just tickles the beet on to the conveyor web at the front and cleans it very gently on rollers. The operator has a camera view from the end of the elevator, so he can feed the beet nicely into the trailer.”

On a good day, a loading shovel will put on 38 loads or about 1000t of beet, he reckons, whereas the euro-Maus will achieve almost double that.

“The best we’ve done with one machine is 103 loads in a day – that’s a lot of beet,” Mr Warnes says.

Loading speed and gentle handling are not the machine’s only attributes, though. By putting beet into temporary storage piles on the headland straight from the harvester, the cost of tractors and trailers hauling to a hard-standing storage area is eliminated, along with the damage they cause to the soil.

“It doesn’t suit every field or every farm because you need a harvester with big enough holding capacity to run to the headland efficiently and you need a good road system to get the trucks to the clamp,” notes Mr Warnes. “But where it can be done, it’s very efficient, good for the beet and good for the land.”