Opinion: Growing beet has been subject to ‘death by a thousand cuts’
© GNP I have just plucked up the courage to check on our recent sugar beet returns. Admittedly this year’s crop was not my finest work – it was on relatively heavy land, and some didn’t germinate until rain in June before baking out in the hottest summer on record.
Bitter experience says to harvest beet early too, such that a decent crop of wheat might be sown afterwards in conditions more akin to savannah than swamp.
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At 48t/ha I’m not sure I would quite describe this year’s performance as a disaster – 2020’s would take some beating on that woeful score – but nor will it show a positive margin after rent and finance.
We have grown sugar beet on this farm for as long as anyone can remember, with an area ranging from a handful to over 100 acres per year.
But its days here might be numbered, because if ever there was a crop that could be studied as an abject failure of recent policy, then we need look no further.
Sugar beet production in this country has been subject to death by a thousand cuts for a decade or more.
Beet can be affected by a complex of aphid-spread viruses known as virus yellows that can reduce yield by up to 50%.
We used to use an insecticidal seed treatment that controlled the aphids, and thus the virus, but alas no longer.
When these treatments were banned a few years ago, the environmental lobby said that we should have been looking at alternatives.
Seven years on, we can now grow varieties supposedly tolerant to the virus, but with yields 15% lower than conventional and with other significant agronomic downsides dropping this further.
There are a few other things that we can do to help to a small degree, but mostly the much-promoted biological cures have been discredited by anyone with even a basic understanding of aphid population dynamics.
This wouldn’t matter per se if we were competing on a vaguely level playing field with sugar grown using products allowed here.
But do you remember when the Conservative party’s conference was sponsored by Tate and Lyle?
They certainly do, because a couple of years afterwards, and at the same time as banning seed treatments here, tariffs were completely lifted on cane sugar being brought into the country.
Last year this allowance was once again increased to 325,000t versus a domestic sugar yield of roughly a million tonnes.
If you think that South American cane is grown with the utmost of environmental consideration, I have a fipronil-plastered bridge to sell you.
We now move onto one of my favourite peeves – energy. Sugar extraction requires a large chunk of it.
But do you know who has, on the back of ridiculous green policy, the most expensive commercial energy in the entire world? Oh yes, that would be us again.
Meanwhile you can import your tariff-free cane sugar, grown to lower standards with CBAM-free fertiliser, and extracted with energy that costs less than half that of ours. It’s a good job that environmentalism respects borders.
Labour looks like it might finish what the Conservatives started. We need our government to back industry and business of any kind.
But what we need most in our policy is pragmatism before yet another industry slams its doors shut for good.