Sugar Beet
It will be February tomorrow and for the first time in my farming career, and my entire experince on the farm here, we have sugar beet still in the ground to be harvested. The crop is contracted to British Sugar, usually we have everything harvested by mid-December at the latest and the fields all drilled up with winter wheat. In 2010 British Sugar in their wisdom decided to delay opening the factories and taking delivery of the crop. I had decided to grow a few more acres to be sure of fulfilling my contract. We all got caught out by the unprecedented weather in December of last year. As a consequence we have frost damaged sugar beet, we do not know as yet if they are good enough to deliver. It is not just this crop that is affected we have lost out on a potential 2011 wheat crop in this field. It is uncertain at this stage if we will be able to crop the field in 2011. I have never had such a situation before.