With the first post-quota sugar beet campaign in full swing, Tereos has introduced what is claims is the first connected sugar beet. Developed jointly by Tereos New Technologies team and Agronomic Department, this technology allows digging machine settings to be refined in order to maintain the quality of the harvest and therefore its preservation. It is a major challenge in the context of the extension of the campaigns.

Currently in the experimental stage, connected sugar beet should eventually supply the sugar beet zones of the nine Tereos sugar factories in France.

Placed in the field to be harvested by machine, the connected sugar beet follows the usual path of sugar beet in the digger, passing through the turbines up to the hopper and then to the silo. The frequency and intensity of the shocks are recorded at each step and reproduced graphically in real time on a tablet. A quick identification of the shocks helps refine the digger settings and thus preserves the quality of the harvest.

“The Agronomic Department, thanks to its 15 years of experimentation on preservation, has demonstrated that a setting called “preservation” reduces by 50% the percentage of bruised sugar beet, compared to a standard setting. The work that we are carrying out on connected sugar beet, related to the work on the connected potato, allows us to refine even more the lifting advice intended for growers. The goal is to create an educational tool to continually support cooperative growers for better preservation of sugar beet”, explained Ste´phane Decouvelaere, New Agricultural Technology Representative at Tereos.

Connected sugar beet is squarely in line with the work led by Tereos in agronomic innovation for competitive agriculture. In 2016, Tereos created a unit dedicated to innovation and new agricultural technologies. This unit also conducts numerous experiments (precision farming, use of drones, satellite images, bio-mechanics, embedded computing, etc.) whose results are shared with the cooperative growers to promote efficient and sustainable farming. Like connected sugar beet, these agronomic innovations are among the many responses contributed by Tereos to agricultural issues raised by the end of sugar quotas, in order to improve competitive agriculture.