Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Sugar beet

Collapse

X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Sugar beet

    Anyone grown it on an allotment?

    Is it possible to retrieve sugar from it?

  • #2
    No and Yes.............................https://www.sugar.org/blog/refining-...g-sugar-beets/

    Comment


    • #3
      It doesn't seem worth it, except for novelty value.
      You'd need to grow quite a lot to get a decent amount of sugar, the extraction process would be difficult, and sugar is dirt-cheap to buy, anyway.

      Comment


      • #4
        Can you grow low sugar ones...……………………………...

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by burnie View Post
          Can you grow low sugar ones...……………………………...
          That's literally just beetroot...

          Comment


          • #6
            I've no idea how "sweet" sugar beet tastes as a vegetable but can it be cooked and used in the way that carrots were used to replace sugar in wartime recipes?

            Comment


            • #7
              Found this...............https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-...ar-from-beets/

              Comment


              • #8
                "Ten pounds of sugar beets yields about 1 cup of sugar."

                Yikes!

                Oh well, that may remain a pipe dream...

                Comment


                • #9
                  I think you will find sugar beet is heavily subsidised, it's so inefficient compared to cane.

                  You could use it in your ersatz acorn coffee!
                  Riddlesdown (S Croydon)

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Using some numbers pulled from Farmers Weekly articles and general web searches:

                    yield of processed sugar is 15.5% (in 2017, 1.38 Mt sugar from 8.9 Mt beets);
                    record UK yield in 2017 was 121 tonnes per hectare, at 100,000 plants per hectare, which implies average 1.2 kg beets and roughly 1 plant per square foot (how much of that is space 'wasted' to allow machinery access?); best yield of sugar per beet, however, is obtained from plants sown at 15 cm spacing, i.e. 4 per square foot (could you actually fit 4.8 kg of beet in a square foot??).

                    So, best case scenario, on a small scale SFG allotment bed, with tenderly coddled plants, you might get 4 x 121 t/ha x 15.5% = 7.5 kg of sugar per square metre, which you could buy at the supermarket for less than £5, and you've not factored in the not insignificant energy cost of processing your beet pulp.

                    I'm disappointed.

                    Comment

                    Latest Topics

                    Collapse

                    Recent Blog Posts

                    Collapse
                    Working...
                    X