sugar beet
| sugar beet | |
|---|---|
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| Art |
Beta vulgaris Subspecies Beta vulgaris subsp. vulgaris |
| group | Altissima Group |
| origin | Silesia |
| known since | circa 1750 |
The sugar beet ( Beta vulgaris subsp. Vulgaris , Altissima Group) is an agricultural crop ; it belongs to the foxtail family (Amaranthaceae). It used to be part of the goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae), which are now included in the foxtail family. Like fodder beet and beetroot , it is a cultivated form of the common beet ( Beta vulgaris subsp. Vulgaris ). It comes from the wild beetroot or wild beetroot ( Beta vulgaris subsp. Maritima ) and has been changed in breeding to a greatly increased content of sugar ( sucrose (table sugar )).
The sugar beet is the most important sugar crop in the temperate regions . By- products are produced during sugar production , which are used as feed or substrate for fermentations .
The importance of sugar beet as a renewable raw material , e.g. B. for the production of bioethanol and biogas .
biology
The sugar beet is a biennial plant that is one of the cross-pollinators . It only forms an inflorescence and seeds in the second year .
In the first year, in the vegetative stage, it develops a leaf rosette above ground with approximately 20 broad, up to 30 centimeters long leaves , and the roots thicken into a white beet body. The sugar beet is a taproot, its roots can reach up to one and a half meters deep into the ground.
The harvest takes place in the first year of vegetation, as reserve materials are stored during this period and thus the sugar content, which determines the economic benefit, is highest. At the time of harvest, the beet weighs 700 to 1200 grams. The highest sugar content is concentrated in the center of the beet.
In the second year, the generative phase, an approximately 1.5 meter high branched inflorescence with inconspicuous five-fold flowers develops . As a result of late frosts or longer periods with temperatures between 0 and 8 ° C after sowing, vernalization can already take place in the first year , which leads to undesirable bolting . These have a disruptive effect on the mechanical harvest and cause lower yields, since the beet bodies remain small and thus provide a low sugar yield.
Since they also leave several hundred germinable seeds in the soil, which can survive in the soil for a long time without losing their ability to germinate, they also endanger future beet cultivation on the same area. They must therefore be removed before flowering.
The sugar beet is mainly cultivated in the moderate climatic area. The main distribution area is Europe , but it is also grown in the USA, Canada , North Africa and in some Asian countries. In Europe, the cultivation takes place from Finland to the Mediterranean countries. Unlike in Central and Northern Europe, sugar beet is not sown in the Mediterranean countries in spring, but in October or November. The harvest then takes place the following summer.
For a high yield, the sugar beet needs moderate temperatures, lots of light, a constant water supply and deep, nutrient-rich soils with good water supply. Sugar beet's water requirement is particularly high in July and August. In the youth stage, the plant is sensitive to frost, night frosts below -5 ° C lead to the death of the plants.
history
The chemist Andreas Sigismund Marggraf first demonstrated the sugar content of beetroot in 1747 . In 1801, after the successful selection of the Silesian white turnip , the physico-chemist Franz Carl Achard also laid the foundations for industrial sugar production. The world's first beet sugar factory was built in Cunern ( Silesia ).
The rise of sugar beet as a supplier of sugar began with Napoleon's continental barrier from 1807 to 1813. This measure made importing sugar from the colonies more expensive. But the people in Europe were no longer willing to give up sugar. The beet sugar industry flourished during the continental lockdown. With the victory over Napoleon, this development suddenly stopped. The beet sugar could no longer compete with the cheaper cane sugar. The Prussian sugar beet industry went downhill. It is different in France, where the continental blockade continued to have an effect.
The mechanization of sugar beet cultivation began around 1850 with the introduction of the Wanzleber plow ( deep cultivation plow ) and the seed drill.
Emergence
The sugar beet originated in the middle of the 18th century through breeding from the beetroot , with a targeted selection for a high sugar content . This made it possible to increase the sugar content from an initial 8 to 16 percent (around 1800). Today's sugar beets have a sugar content of 18 to 20 percent. Sugar is an energy-rich product of photosynthesis and is used by the plant as a storage substance.
Cultivation
The cultivation of sugar beet is very profitable where the conditions allow it, but places particularly high demands on the condition, fertilization and cultivation of the soil . The drier the climate, the more the beet requires deep, fresh soil with plenty of nutrients. Humous loam and loess soils are best suited , poor, dry sandy soils , tough clay soils and all shallow, wet soil types are unsuitable .
Since the sugar beet is not compatible with itself, it cannot be grown again in the same field in the following growing season, a multi- annual crop rotation is required. Some plant species that are attacked by pests or fungi similar to sugar beet, such as cabbage or spinach , are unsuitable as previous crops , as nematodes multiply here , which also attack the beets.
In order to make the cultivation of sugar beet as economical as possible, growers now have intensive advice available (e.g. the agricultural information service for sugar beet). The advice covers the areas of tillage, varieties , fertilization, plant protection , harvesting, storage, etc.
seed
Sowing before the mechanization of agriculture
People like to grow sugar beet after fertilized winter grain, topple the stubble as soon as possible, plow deep after a few weeks and harrow and roll in spring. If you want to fertilize freshly, the fertilizer must be put into the soil very early in autumn. Of the mineral fertilizers, phosphates come first. Since the vegetation period lasts 26 to 30 weeks, sow the seeds as early as possible, at the end of March or beginning of April, on flat land or in ridges, in rows or in pits as a dip seed . The richer the soil, the narrower it has to be built in order not to get too large beets. When sowing in rows, a distance of 30 to 50 centimeters is given, the potted sowing is usually carried out with the dibbling machine . You need 9 to 10 kilograms for this, and for drill seeds 15 to 20 kilograms of seeds per hectare. Any encrustation of the soil before the seed emerges is removed by driving over it with a spiked roller, later you hoe two or three times and finally let it be lightly drilled. After the first hoeing, the beets are separated to 18 to 20 centimeters, and this work is made easier when sowing rows by pulling the horse hoe across. All but the strongest of the remaining plants are pulled out and placed between the rows to prevent the weeds from emerging.
Sowing according to modern standards
The sowing takes place in Central Europe from mid-March to early May. Technically elaborate (pelleted) seeds are sown as single-grain seeds with single-grain seed drills in rows at a distance of 45 centimeters or 50 centimeters and a depth of 2 to 3 centimeters, with seven to eleven plants per square meter being achieved. Equal sowing is currently failing mainly because of the existing lifting technology, since row spacings in the range of 30 centimeters and plant spacings of 30 centimeters in the row lead to problems with blockages of the harvester by beet leaves and weeds.
Recently, beets are also sown in Schlitzsaat sporadically, even Streifenfrässaat or strip-till called. This is a special method of single-grain sowing, in which the soil is loosened up to a depth of 25 centimeters only in the seed row. This is done using tine coulters that are arranged in front of the seed drill. According to initial findings, the advantages over conventional mulch sowing with seedbed preparation in spring are more even seed emergence, high energy efficiency and low workload per hectare, as well as good protection against soil erosion . This procedure may also improve water efficiency in the vegetation phase.
harvest
The harvest begins from mid-September to around mid-December, although a later harvest in good weather has advantages, as the sugar content increases with longer growing season. The beet harvest time is also called the beet campaign .
In the past, sugar beet was harvested by hand. You cut off the head and leaves with a shovel and then pricked the beets out, or you pricked them out first and then removed the head and leaves with a knife. A spade , fork, beet puller or beet lifter was used to pry out. The beet leaves were used as fodder. The sticking earth was removed from the poked beets. The cleaned beets were loaded onto a trailer either by hand or with a beet fork and usually transported by rail to the sugar factory for further processing .
As a substitute for pure manual labor, devices pulled by draft animals later appeared. First and foremost, the head slide for cutting off the beet head and the leaves as well as the beet lifting body attached to the leg of a cart plow for loosening the beets from the ground should be mentioned here.
Even today, the harvesting process still takes place in three steps: removing the leaves and the beet head, pulling the beet out of the ground and picking up the beet from the ground. There is the option of having the first two work steps done by one machine and the picking up by a second machine, or all work steps can be carried out with one machine, the beet harvester . These machines are available either in a self-propelled version or for operation on a tractor . The leaves of the beets are chopped up when they are removed and either left in the field for fertilization or loaded directly onto a trailer and used as fodder.
The yield is between 40 and 70 tons of beet per hectare of cultivation area, from this amount around 10 tons of sugar can be produced. In 1859, field fertilization tests by the Chemische Fabrik zu Schöningen showed a yield of around 38 tons per hectare (189.4 quintals per acre ). In contrast, the unfertilized sugar beet cultivation of a piece of land only reached 18 tons per hectare (90.1 quintals per acre).
The total energy required to produce a tonne of sugar in this case is about 11,200 megajoules (corresponding to the calorific value of around 267 kg of crude oil. See Oil unit ) of this total, about 2,500 MJ (equivalent to 60 kg of oil equivalent) in the field of production (for tillage, fertilization, seed, Plant protection and harvest) and an average of 600 MJ (corresponding to 14 kilograms of oil equivalent) for transporting the cleared beets from the field to the sugar factory. The energy content of one ton of sugar is 16,800 megajoules, which is 50 percent more than the manufacturing cost.
Pests and diseases
The most common pest in Central Europe is the beet cyst nematode . Other pests include a. the turnip moth , eelworm , onion maggot , Moss button beetles and wireworms . Snails are particularly important as feeding pests in young plants, while gamma-owls tend to occur in older plants . Diseases are Cercospora leaf spots , beet rust and late beet rot .
use
Sugar beet is grown as a raw material for industrial sugar production ( sucrose ). The sugar yield is almost 16% of the beet mass used.
Beet leaves are produced as a by-product of the harvest, most of which is worked back into the soil as green manure . The beet leaf is also used to a lesser extent as fodder for cattle.
Another industrial by-product is molasses, a syrup that is made up of around 4% of the processed beet mass and has been desugarized by crystallization , but still contains a lot of sugar and is rich in nutrients . It serves, among other things, the industrial alcohol production through fermentation , but also as a nutrient medium for the biotechnological production of other products, such as. B. Baker's yeast or citric acid in white biotechnology . It is also used in the feed industry. The largely sugar-free by-product resulting from further processing of the molasses is vinasse , which is also used as a feed additive and fertilizer.
The beet pulp leached out by the sugar production still has a high proportion of sugar and also contains protein, which is why they are used as animal feed, especially for ruminants . For every 100 kilograms of processed beet there are around 20 to 22 kilograms of pressed pulp with a dry matter content of around 20%.
Sugar beet syrup ("turnip tops"), sometimes also molasses, is eaten as a spread, especially in the growing areas. Turnip tops are also available in stores across Germany.
In addition to being used as animal feed, sugar beets are increasingly being used as a renewable raw material (in short: Nawaro), e.g. B. used to produce ethanol ( bioethanol ). Sugar beet is also an energy-rich and rapidly fermentable substrate for the production of biogas .
The leaves are similar to those of the leaf chard ; they can be used as leafy vegetables like Swiss chard.
Economical meaning
According to the World Food Organization FAO, a total of around 275 million tonnes of sugar beet were harvested worldwide in 2018. The ten largest producers together generated 78.6% of the world's harvest.
The largest sugar beet producers
| rank | country | Quantity (in t ) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |
 Russia
|
42,065,957 |
| 2 |
 France
|
39,579,925 |
| 3 |
 United States
|
30,068,647 |
| 4th |
 Germany
|
26.191.400 |
| 5 |
 Turkey
|
18,900,000 |
| 6th |
 Poland
|
14,302,911 |
| 7th |
 Ukraine
|
13,967,700 |
| 8th |
 People's Republic of China
|
13,967,700 |
| 9 |
 Egypt
|
11,222,720 |
| 10 |
 United Kingdom
|
7,620,000 |
| world | 274.886.306 |
Importance for sugar production
The proportion of sugar beet as a raw material source for the production of sugar has decreased in the past decades. In the 2005/06 marketing year, 109.4 million tons (74 percent) were produced from sugar cane and 38.3 million tons (26 percent) from sugar beet worldwide. In the 1960s the ratio was 57 percent cane and 43 percent beet sugar. The absolute amount of beet sugar produced, however, remained relatively stable due to an overall strong increase in sugar production. In the EU, 112 million tons of beets are produced per year, about, from which the European sugar industry 13 to 15 million tons of granulated sugar wins. In almost all European countries, sugar is made from sugar beet. Germany, with around 400,000 hectares, as well as France and Poland are the main producers. Almost 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Europe today comes from domestic cultivation. A large part of this is due to the protective tariffs of the EU, which favor domestic beet sugar over cheaper cane sugar (see protectionism ). This makes sugar more expensive for European consumers.
Herbicide Resistant Varieties
In 2015, in the USA, 471,000 hectares, almost exclusively genetically modified , herbicide-resistant sugar beets were grown. With 15,000 hectares of GMO sugar beet acreage in Canada (almost the entire Canadian sugar beet acreage) together comprise ha acreage of the two countries almost the entire global GMO sugar beet acreage of 486,000. The cultivation of genetically modified sugar beet has greatly facilitates weed control, as almost exclusively glyphosate as Weedkillers can be used. Compared to conventional cultivation, which usually uses several different weed control agents, only glyphosate is used for glyphosate-resistant sugar beets. However, there is a risk that the increased occurrence of glyphosate-resistant weeds will ruin the success. Another problem is that an outcrossing of glyphosate resistance to related crops and wild forms cannot be completely ruled out.
literature
- Klaus-Ulrich Heyland (Ed.): Special Plant Cultivation, 7th edition, Ulmer, Stuttgart 1952, 1996, ISBN 3-8001-1080-6 , pp. 203 ff.
- Reinhold Schildbach : Promotion of emergence, youth growth and yield formation in sugar beets. Giessen 1966
Web links
- Interesting facts about sugar beet from the agricultural portal proplanta
- Sugar from beets. History of cultivation in Prussia
- Agricultural information service for sugar beet
- Advice and information for the southern German sugar beet cultivation
- Werner Luder, Ruedi Stark, Helmut Ammann: Sugar beet: Harvest management and costs. Make good use of heavy harvesting machines without compacting the soil
- Ernst Spiess, Etienne Diserens: Sugar beet: harvesting technology and soil protection. Diverse interactions between technology, harvest quality and ecology
Individual evidence
- ↑ Scientific names of Beta vulgaris in MMPND .
- ↑ a b nachwachsenderohstoffe.de Renewable raw materials in 2009 again on around 2 million hectares . October 21, 2009; Retrieved February 15, 2010.
- ↑ a b conference volume “Biogas in Agriculture - Status and Perspectives” . (PDF) Agency for Renewable Raw Materials (FNR), Gülzower Expert Discussions, Volume 32, 2009, 458 pages; Retrieved February 15, 2010.
- ↑ Description of shoots
- ↑ The sugar beet - The career of a political tuber . In: NZZ , December 18, 2015.
- ↑ top agrar. Magazine for modern agriculture , 2/2008.
- ^ Paul Schweigmann: The agricultural machines and their maintenance . 1st edition. Pfanneberg, Gießen 1955, reprinted by Bulldog-Press, Limburg ad Lahn 1993, ISBN 3-9803332-1-3 , p. 231 ff.
- ^ Wilhelm Rimpau : Fertilization experiments with sugar beets, in particular with the use of fertilizers rich in phosphorus . In: The chemical farm man . Volume 5, Adolph Stöckhardt (Ed.), Verlag Georg Wigand, Leipzig 1859, pp. 102-110.
- ↑ Horst Eichhorn (Ed.): Landtechnik . 7th edition, Ulmer, Stuttgart 1952, 1999, ISBN 3-8001-1086-5 , p. 350.
- ↑ Article Sugar : "Its energy content is 16.8 kilojoules per gram".
- ↑ Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV): Statistical Yearbook on Food, Agriculture and Forests 2009 (PDF; 5.8 MB), p. 229, accessed on March 8, 2011.
- ↑ a b Crops> Sugar beet. In: FAO production statistics 2018. fao.org, accessed on March 9, 2020 (English).
- ↑ proplanta.de www.Proplanta.de, accessed on August 3, 2009.
- ↑ proplanta.de proplanta.de www.Proplanta.de, accessed on August 3, 2009.
- ↑ a b Genetically modified sugar beet: Cultivation areas worldwide May 9, 2016. transparency Genetic engineering. Retrieved April 26, 2017.
- ↑ Morishita, DW (2017). "Impact of glyphosate-resistant sugar beet." Pest Manag Sci: n / an / a. doi: 10.1002 / ps.4503 .
- ↑ McGinnis, EE, et al. (2010). "Sweet and sour: a scientific and legal look at herbicide-tolerant sugar beet." Plant Cell 22 (6): 1653-1657. doi: 10.1105 / tpc.110.077198 .