Yes, I do amuse myself… But seriously, this has been a fun set of experiments. Damage to sugar beets during harvest and transport can be very costly in terms of sugar loss during storage. This general idea is something that seems to be pretty well understood. The depth of knowledge on the different conditions that…
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If there is one thing that I hope to know more about than anyone else in the world at the end of my PhD, it is how air moves through sugar beet clamps, and how this air movement impacts the quality of the beets over time. To this end, one of the major research trials…
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In May this year (2019), the IIRB Beet Quality and Storage study group had their latest meeting. The first speaker was from KWS in Germany – Elka Hilscher – and talked about the distribution of the good and the bad within sugar beets. I’ve written a summary of this work for Betordlaren (coming soon). If…
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The storage period is short. Is building a scale model of a beet clamp a solution to extending this, for research purposes? In my mind, absolutely (obviously). I can’t imaging how much more we’d be able to learn about the thermo- and fluid dynamics of a clamp during one year if we could run 5…
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(Not the actual title…) This is an English version of my 3rd contribution to Betorlaren (2018 #4), the Swedish sugar beet industry’s magazine. This was an early draft: the final Swedish version looks and reads better, thanks to the four helpful editors that fixed it up before it even went to the publishers. In…
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In Brief (originally written for the NBR Facebook page): Stage 2 of NBRs main storage trail for 2018 was texture and quality at harvest analysis. Conducted at the labs of our German COBRI collaboration partner, Ifz, texture analysis involved subjecting beets to surface penetration tests and compression tests. Penetration tests involve a 2mm needle being…
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Originally written for the NBR Facebook page: There have been few benefits from the lack of rain in 2018 and NBRs research has not been immune to the challenges the year has thrown up. But one of our research trials may actually benefit from the dry. The trial is part of the harvest and storage series,…
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Literally. The harvest campaign of 2017 is remembered as a wet one. While it was underway, I’m sure many were wishing for a better foundation for their clamps sites. This year, for now, we have that. So, while the ground in hard and dry, could it be worth trying to maintain a patch of the…
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Feature image credit: Michael Welling, Thünen-Institut (fyi, Johann Heinrich von Thünen – possibly my favourite economist.) While we’re still a long way away from harvesting and storing sugar beets this season in Sweden, we’ve got a bit of time just now to look forward to this busy time and consider what we might be facing.…
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(Feature image credit: Martin Lishman Ltd, UK) The ‘Connected Beet’ was a highlight of the IIRB 2018 Congress for me. It’s a 3D printed ‘sugar beet’, with a sensor inside that reads number and magnitude of impacts on the beet as it moves through a harvester, or any other process a beet may go through.…
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