Sugar beet price 2020

Daniel

Member
What good are August price announcements? We should be being told by now. I don’t think the growers are militant enough, British Sugar is nothing without its producer base.

We could do with a new (to us) beet hoe, but it’s hard even to justify a few £ks investment in beet when British Sugar give so little confidence.
 

Hereward

Member
Location
Peterborough
It seems an annual past time, sugar beet growers complain about the price, shout about how they're going to drop it after growing for it 150 years, then plant the same area they always have.

With OSR being even less attractive, what else are you going to grow?

British Sugar need to make money, if they pay to much for their raw product then no one will be growing it in a few years time.

Put yourself in BS shoes, you'd do the same, pay just enough to keep your raw material being produced.
And BS do the same, put themselves in the growers shoes, how much do we need to keep growing it?
 

Daniel

Member
It seems an annual past time, sugar beet growers complain about the price, shout about how they're going to drop it after growing for it 150 years, then plant the same area they always have.

With OSR being even less attractive, what else are you going to grow?

British Sugar need to make money, if they pay to much for their raw product then no one will be growing it in a few years time.

Put yourself in BS shoes, you'd do the same, pay just enough to keep your raw material being produced.
And BS do the same, put themselves in the growers shoes, how much do we need to keep growing it?

Alternatively, they could do a half decent job of marketing their end product.
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Looks ok until you take into account harvesting costs, soil and track damage and difficulty y of establishing following crop.

Certainly a big barrier to no till

Being geared up to grow it probably has a big effect on fished cost structure as well I guess ? Although many use contractors for the entire job I guess ?
 

Brisel

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Midlands
Cultivation / Drilling / spraying clashes with cereal workload needing extra labour / machinery capacity maybe ?

Not really unless you've got a big area of spring combinables. For most growers it's only a small % of the farm anyway. For me the biggest pain was washing SUs out of the sprayer before going onto beet. Oh, and the soil destruction when lifting late & wet then having to do remedial subsoiling after a mediocre late sown wheat crop. Am I selling it well enough here? :D
 

Clive

Staff Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lichfield
Not really unless you've got a big area of spring combinables. For most growers it's only a small % of the farm anyway. For me the biggest pain was washing SUs out of the sprayer before going onto beet. Oh, and the soil destruction when lifting late & wet then having to do remedial subsoiling after a mediocre late sown wheat crop. Am I selling it well enough here? :D

Farm I did my gap year on had a separate sprayer fir beet !

Long time ago though when such luxury was probably affordable (there were x6 of us on 1500ac !)
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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