No beet surrender

FOR more than half a century, the familiar autumn "pong" and the accompanying plume of white smoke billowing across the York skyline have marked the onset of the sugar beet campaign.

Not everyone has appreciated the sour smell of molasses hanging on the air, especially not those living in the shadow of the sugar factory itself.

But the campaign has been as much a part of the changing of the seasons in York as the falling of autumn leaves or the departure of migrating birds.

Now this annual tradition is doomed to become nothing more than a rapidly-fading memory.

Across North and East Yorkshire, farmers are bringing in their last sugar beet harvests.

Soon, the factory will close its doors for good. And yet another key plank of York's traditional manufacturing base will have gone the way of the carriageworks.

More than 100 jobs will go at the British Sugar plant itself, plus dozens of seasonal posts. But the knock-on effects of the closure will be felt far more widely.

An estimated 1,200 farmers from throughout the region have earned part of their income from supplying the factory with beet. And then there are the hauliers whose job it was to transport the harvest to the factory gates.

For Rosie Dunn and her husband, Alisdair, closure of the factory comes as a double blow. They have been growing sugar beet at North Carlton Farm, Stockton-on-the-Forest, York, for 17 years.

Despite tumbling sugar beet prices, the 250 tonnes they grew this year still made up a "fair proportion of our income", Rosie said.

Beet also provided them with a useful second income, however; because during the five months of the campaign, Alisdair worked as a lorry driver, delivering beet to the factory gates.

That income, too, is now gone.

It will be "a very sad day" when the factory closes for the last time, said Rosie. "It has been associated with York and the rural economy for decades."

Across the region, growers like Rosie and Alisdair are now turning their minds to what to replace their beet crop with.

It has been a hugely important crop, says Melbourne farmer Michael Craven, chairman of the NFU's regional sugar board, whose own personal account of bringing in his last harvest appears on these pages.

It wasn't only the sale value of the sugar beet crop itself. The beet tops were a valuable food for livestock - after this year, Michael is going to have to find some other way of feeding his flock of 800 ewes.

And beet was also important as a "break crop", used in rotation to help fields recover from the strain of growing cereals.

Most farmers did not rely solely on sugar beet for an income, of course - but they are faced with the decision of what to plant in its place.

Many will go for oilseed rape, Michael thinks; the developing biofuel industries in Humberside and Teesside mean there is potentially a growing market. Others, however, might consider more adventurous alternatives believes national sugar board member David Wilmot-Smith.

He devoted 20 acres of his 600-acre mixed arable and livestock farm at Gunby, near Bubwith, to sugar beet. He will be growing oilseed rape next year, plus some spring barley. But for the future, who knows? Climate change might make it possible to even consider a crop such as soya, he says.

There are plenty of grumbles about the short notice British Sugar gave beet farmers about their plans to pull out of York.

There is still suspicion the value of the land in York may have had something to do with that decision - although a British Sugar spokesman stressed again today that that "was not a contributory factor to our decision".

And many farmers are now faced with having to sell expensive beet-farming equipment - Mr Craven, for example, has a £60,000 harvester he bought only five years ago that he somehow has to get a decent price for.

But farmers are not simply crying over spilt milk, Mr Wilmot-Smith insists. "Everybody is looking into the future to see what we can do. Sugar is gone. What can we do instead? That's the question."

Sweet memories with a bitter aftertaste

MICHAEL CRAVEN laments the end of the last sugar beet campaign

Very soon the last of the 2006 sugar beet crop will be making its way into the York sugar factory.

When the gates close it will not only be the end of another campaign, but the end of an era too, with 80 years of sugar processing coming to an end. It will be a very sad day and the repercussions will be felt across the rural economy long after the factory has closed.

Not only will we miss sugar beet as a crop and as a source of valuable income, but York will not be the same during the winter months without the steam rising above the city and the distinctive aroma of molasses from the beet pulp. Another part of York's heritage will have gone.

I do not blame British Sugar for closing the factory - we all have to make cost-cutting decisions where we can in our businesses to survive and British Sugar is no different. If it thinks it can process the crop with four rather than six factories and be more competitive in the sugar markets, good luck to them.

What I do find hard to accept is the way it carried out the closure. July 4 will be remembered not just for another hot day in the summer heatwave, but as the day part of our farm died. At first, I thought my haulier friend who told me about the closure was joking, but I had to accept it was true. What a way to find out - no letter and no explanation. From that moment, British Sugar was in control of the outcome of the closure.

Negotiations with the NFU began and I held a Sugar Board Forum and farm walk at my farm just two days later, with 40 growers listening to NFU president Peter Kendall assure us that the closure - not just of York, but also of Allscott - would not be without a fight.

A few weeks later, I was part of a York Factory Focus Group that met British Sugar, in Peterborough. We put our views and concerns to him with vigour and compassion.

The final outcome was disappointing to say the least. To get only £8 a tonne compensation when only a few years earlier growers had paid £40, showed British Sugar was only interested in offering token compensation. It certainly seemed scant reward for 80 years of dedicated beet growing, with farmers doing everything British Sugar asked of them.

Hard negotiating by the NFU nationally did not deter British Sugar from giving as little away as possible. Then the final straw - just when I thought we had secured at least another year's beet growing for the Newark factory, we were told we would have to haul the beet to Wissington, in East Anglia.

British Sugar knows no Yorkshire growers could stand the high haulage costs of transporting beet that far. So British Sugar got what it wanted - no beet grown in the York area and quota moved south to the four remaining factories.

A resistance group of a few growers around York is still carrying on growing beet for the Newark factory - having bought Newark quota - and they are joined by growers south of the Humber. I wish them all the best of luck for the future.

Looking now at my final sugar crop, I was amazed at how big a yield we have had, considering the difficult growing conditions. The factory has performed better than most growers had thought with the closure hanging over it. Credit must go to the factory staff who have stuck in and got on with the job despite knowing they will be jobless after the campaign has ended.

Contractors and hauliers will be hit hard too, with little or no beet to lift and beet tackle worth only a fraction of what it should be, and hauliers will be looking for work to replace beet leading.

So the York factory closure has affected many people. It will take time to adjust to life without the crop but we will have our memories and maybe we won't know how much it will be missed until later this year when our beet cheque fails to arrive.

* A fuller version of this article can be read in the next issue of the NFU magazine British Farmer And Grower.

Biofuels, biomass and the future

Yorkshire farmers are fortunate in one sense, in that there are developing biofuel industries in both Humberside and Teesside, says Stockton-on-the-Forest farmer Rosie Dunn.

There is potentially a good market, therefore, both for grains such as wheat grown as a biofuel, and for oilseed rape.

Sugar beet itself can also be used to produce bioethanol. Sadly, the cost of transporting the beet to British Sugar's Wissington refinery in Norfolk means it is uneconomical for local farmers to continue growing it for that reason.

Drax Power Station, pictured, could conceivably in future take sugar beet as a biomass fuel, to burn alongside coal.

Given the high cost of processing the beet, however, that was some way off, admitted Drax spokeswoman Melanie Wedgbury.

The power station does, however, hope to expand its use of willow coppice and elephant grass, both of which are being grown locally by farmers.

By 2009, Melanie said, it was hoped ten per cent of the electricity Drax produced would be the result of co-firing with willow and elephant grass.

This would save more than two million tonnes of CO2 a year, Melanie said - as well as proving an expanded market for farmers.

Timeline to closure

A British Sugar spokesman said today it would still be several months before the York factory closed its gates for good.

Beet processing would come to an end in the second week of February, he said, after which some of the 100-strong workforce would leave.

But there would still be significant quantities of both crystal sugar and sugar syrup at the factory. These would continue to be processed until summer. The crystal sugar would then still have to be despatched to customers. "That will take probably until the autumn,"

the spokesman said.