by Suffolk farmers are facing the campaign to dismantle sugar beet – with severe wet conditions preventing them from getting into the fields to complete their harvest.
And there are already fears that less food will be grown overall this year as a result of the terrible conditions.
The clock is ticking on this season’s East Anglian sugar beet crop as British Sugar – which processes the crop at factories including Bury St Edmunds, Cantley and Wissington – prepares for its annual shutdown. The Bury factory is due to close tomorrow (March 9).
The crop is delivered to the factories during the autumn and winter months but at a certain point it becomes financially unviable to keep them open as the loads decrease.
James Forrest from Stonham, near Stowmarket, said the conditions were “unprecedented”.
“It all started to turn a bit wet at the beginning of March and it’s been going on for almost 12 months,” he said.
“We didn’t finish drilling the sugar beet crop until the third week of May – and we still have sugar beet in the ground now.”
Although the beet factory would like to take its crop now, it can’t get it out of the field without the engines being moved and the soil badly damaged.
“We go to the Bury factory so if there’s not enough beet to continue economic production, there comes a point where they stop and it’s sent to Cantley or Wissington somewhere else.
“In the past we’ve been successful in April. We’re being as patient as we can to minimize the damage.”
Even before the October floods (Storm Babet), things were not looking good.
“We lost a lot of winter barley straw because the wet was so terrible we had to cut the straw – so the harvest was challenging to say the least,” said James.
Grain harvests were challenging due to the rain, and by October, farmers faced a “terrible” period as their winter drilling window closed.
James managed to get his beet consignments off the factory on October 14th and then on January 18th – but since then the conditions have not allowed the crop to be raised any more.
“Normally we would hope to have our beet out by Christmas or certainly by January at the latest and to feed the land after sugar beet as well,” he said.
“But it kept raining. There are times we could have harvested sugar beet but we would have made a terrible mess and damaged the soil.”
Fortunately, the farm has its own self-propelled beet harvester, which means it can be activated at short notice.
In January he had a run of almost three weeks and made great progress – but the harvester has been sitting idle in the shed for the past month.
Also due to the weather, like many farmers, James was unable to drill all their winter grain.
He has a few days of growth left on his beetroot, he said, but he was waiting patiently.
“We’ve had a lot of rain in the last two or three weeks. I don’t know where it’s all coming from – I don’t know,” he said.
“Compared to people who had their homes flooded it’s really insignificant but the wet weather had a significant impact on our business.
“Obviously we planned to drill autumn cereals. We had to buy scarce spring seed and the price reflected that – and that had cash flow implications.”
James managed to do about three quarters of his drilling last autumn before the Heavens opened – but that still leaves a lot of work to be done.
“The spring workload will be huge – and we’re not the only ones who didn’t manage to drill everything in the autumn,” he said.
Not only that, but the weather has damaged drainage systems – and on his own farm he has seen siltation in fields – despite the fact that fields are under-drained. “I’ve seen it sitting wet in areas I’ve never seen it sitting before,” he said.
At the same time, grain prices are falling.
“There will be some serious consequences from this,” he said. “There is great concern in the industry. We are sitting here with some very poor-looking crops because of the weather. Prices have fallen significantly. Things are not looking rosy.
“We are preparing budgets and cash flows and it is not a very encouraging outlook at the moment.”
East Anglia has had its hottest and wettest February on record. An average of 106.4mm of rain fell during the month – beating the previous record of 95.2mm set in 1916. The average temperature was 8.2C – beating the previous record of 7.6C set in 1990 .
Like James, Andrew Francis, of Home Farm Nacton, near Ipswich, is frustrated. He still has two or three hectares of beet left to harvest.
“There’s a chance we won’t get them out in time. Anyone with beets left is facing factory closure,” he said.
The tough choice may be paying much higher transportation costs to get them to a factory that is still open — or losing the crop, he said.
As well as the harvest’s woes, he had difficulties planting – and reckoned the wet had set back his crucial farming season by two or three weeks.
“What we are facing now is a work calendar that is consolidating,” he said. “We’re probably already locked into some yield loss because of where we are in the calendar. Some of these areas are going to want a week or two to dry out.”
He added: “There may be areas of the farm that have no food crops. We may put them in a cover crop for this season.”
Andrew Blenkiron, director of the Euston Estate near Thetford, said conditions had been “frustrating and expensive” for planting and harvesting crops this year.
This affected the planting of autumn crops as well as the harvesting of sugar beet during the winter – and left a riverside area where sheep graze normally under water for most of the season.
“We can’t go ahead and do any ground work now so we’re struggling to get land ready to plant spring crops.
“We’re probably a month behind where we want to be and that’s starting to get really frustrating.
“There will be a financial impact if it is not possible to plant the autumn crops and the delay now could affect results as we go into the summer.”
British Sugar, meanwhile, is winding down operations and has given expected dates to close some of its factories.
Dan Downs, head of agricultural operations at British Sugar, said: “We are continuing to run all East Anglian factories at minimum throughput to extend the length of the campaign as much as possible to help our growers, hauliers and harvesting contractors.”
The expected final campaign dates for the factories are: Bury St Edmunds – 9th March, Wissington – 15th March, Cantley and Newark – early April – with dates depending on the amount of crops received.
“We continue to monitor the situation closely and are in regular communication with our growers and hauliers as we work together to finish the 2023-24 campaign,” Mr Downs said.
