Our company invests more than €60 million per year in the development of new sugar beet varieties. But also a global network of 16 breeding stations and more than 40 trial sites. “Their tools are state-of-the-art methods, such as cell & tissue culture, marker-assisted selection, genomic prediction, digital phenotyping, bioinformatics. A large amount of the solutions against these pathogens can and will come from breeding, and we will continue to search for more robust varieties.”Īccording to Loock, more than 350 professionals in breeding and research currently work at KWS for the development of new sugar beet varieties. “The reduced availability of plant protection products (PPPs) in combination with climate change will lead to more direct and indirect damage caused by insects. “Biotic and abiotic stresses are important and will have an increasing importance for the next decade,” he explains. 1 target remains the intrinsic sugar yield, says Tschoep. Another very important focus is yield stability between environments and years,” he says. “Besides this, there are virus diseases like Virus yellows which is transmitted by aphids. The biggest challenge however, is to find the right balance between the resistance-level and yield.”Īccording to Stange, the main targets are yield characteristics, mainly sugar yield and sugar content, and resistances/tolerances against the main pests and disease like Rhizomania, nematodes and leaf diseases like Cercospora beticola and powdery mildew. This approach allows us to offer the strongest tailor-made varieties for each market. Growing conditions require varieties with particular characteristics which, through breeding, we aim to strengthen. “Different environments and Henning Friehe The last goal is to be on the lookout for diseases: Sclerotium rolfsii, beet cyst nematodes, Rhizoctonia solani and Cercospora beticola.īetaseedt argets its markets each in a unique way, says Friehe. We select on the key parameters which determine the sugar yield: root yield and sugar content.” Secondly, he says a strong focus on heat and drought stress and water use efficiency. “First of all, we need as much white sugar yield per hectare as we can get. The breeders of our company are very clear about their selection goals, says Verlaine. Andreas Loock, Head of Breeding Sugarbeet, KWS in Germany. Christophe Verlaine, General Director of Kuhn & Co International B.V., in The Netherlands and with Dr. Michael Stange, Head of Product Management Sugarbeet at Strube D&S GmbH in Germany, Mr. To learn more about this crop, European Seed spoke with Henning Friehe, Product Manager, of Betaseed Gmbh in Germany, Hendrik Tschoep, R&D Director at SESVanderHave in Belgium, Dr. Besides sugar beet production, the continent also has an important refining industry that processes imported raw cane sugar. Europe’s most competitive producing areas are in northern France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland. The northern half of Europe is where most of the EU’s sugar beet is grown, as the climate is more suitable. The EU is the world’s leading producer of beet sugar, with around 50% of the total amount produced. The largest producing countries were Russia, France, U.S. All together the hectares produced 275 million tonnes of sugar beets. According to the FAO, in 2018, a little over 4.8 million ha of sugarbeet were harvested, which were distributed as follows: EU-28 (EU): 1.7 m ha East Europe (EE): 1.5 m ha North America (NA): 0.5 m ha Rest of the world (ROW): 1.1 ha. Of the worlds sugar production, about 20% comes from beet sugar, with the other 80% produced from sugar cane.
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