Nelson’s Sweet Legacy............ Among the many offerings from the chattering classes at the bar of the Hoste Arms was heard the remark: “Why do they grow soo many of those funny lettuces in Norfolk” Well now tha’s funny you should ask …….. Nelson could never have known that his little spat with Napoleon at Trafalgar would be the accident of history which would spawn the modern beet sugar industry. The French emperor was so incensed at the Royal Navy’s blockade of his ports, keeping out colonial supplies of raw cane sugar, that he ‘ordered’ the country’s farmers to grow sugar from ‘beets’ instead. Within a hundred years the new crop was widespread across Europe and making its first tentative moves across the channel into Nelson’s birthplace of Norfolk. Derived from a sea-shore plant (you can easily spot them growing along the Norfolk coast) beta maritima is the fore-runner of the root crop which is now cultivated so widely in the region and then delivered to local factories – well apart from the ones which bounce onto your windscreen from lorries on the roundabout. It’s a little known fact that more home-grown beet sugar is eaten in this country than comes from imports of the cane variety. The contents of the familiar Silver Spoon packets start life in the fields of East Anglia and the Midlands. The first factory was built in 1912 on the banks of the River Yare at the sleepy Broadland village of Cantley, near Acle, by a dutch migrant farmer called Johannes van Rossum. After a shaky start with a shortage of beet supplies (additional roots had to be brought in from Holland in barges), the fledgling industry was given a major shot in the arm by the war-time needs of self-sufficiency. This time it was the German U-boats destroying our regular supplies of commonwealth cane sugar which catalysed the home-grown industry. By 1928 there were 18 independent factories running from Cupar in Fife down to Ipswich in Suffolk, and from Bardney in Lincolnshire to Kidderminster in the West Midlands. In 1936 the government stepped in to further underpin the strategic importance of the home industry and nationalised the lot: the ‘British Sugar Corporation’ was born. Since joining the EU in 1973 the impact of government divestment and commercial pressure has contrived to rationalise the number of factories to just the four remaining ones, two of which are in Norfolk. It takes about six fully grown sugar beet to make a one kilogram bag of sugar and the farmer is paid a bonus the higher the root sugar content is. Top farmers can get a yield of over four tonnes per acre of sugar, average farmers around three tonnes and the rest keep quiet. There is a spirit of healthy boastfulness between neighbours and debates abound with fictitious claims frequently being made. These figures are known colloquially as ‘pub yields’. British Sugar is the benign monopoly, charged with the sole responsibility for converting the beet roots into a more handy format for the housewife. Farmers are paid for the sugar in the beet and the rest is made into pulp nuts and goes for livestock feed. There are other convenient re-cycling stories as well with beet, like the lime cake used for purifying the sugar juice which is then spread back on the fields to counteract soil acidity. Originally gangs harvested beet by hand, with the lifted roots being ‘knocked and topped’ in the field, before being forked onto ‘tumbrils’ for transport to the railhead or barge. It takes a strong man to lift an acre of beet which is why most farmers now use a harvester. These are now increasingly huge mobile leviathans, harvesting up to twelve rows of beet at a time, working progressively up and down the field, around pylons, into hedges, gateposts and visitors cars. Beet sugar factories, not sugar beet factories (dropping this type of comment into the conversation marks you out as an expert), open their gates in September for the annual processing season, known affectionately as the ‘campaign’. This is not to be confused with a military campaign, least not till tempers fray later in the year when the beet heaps freeze over and factories go slow. British Sugar tells the farmers when to deliver their beet by issuing ‘permits’ for each load the farmer is expected to send in. This is never enough and leads to endless argument and debate over the phone, down the pub, before breakfast, after the last waltz, and so on. Sometimes, when supplies of beet are short as can happen at the start or finish of the campaign, the factory allows unrestricted deliveries, or ‘free loading’. Farmers are experts at this. Sugar comes in a multitude of formats and packages and fulfils a number of roles in food manufacturing apart from just sweetening, which include the bulking properties needed for jam making, as well as preserving and texturising. The three most familiar grades of sugar are : 1. Granular 2. Sachets, gift-wrapped for maximum inconvenience in handling 3. Lumpy, as found in transport café sugar bowls with spilt tea added As part of Viscount Coke of Holkham’s now legendary four-course farming rotation (latterly modified to include more profitable crops such as ‘pop festival’ and ‘housing estate’) sugar beet is a valuable addition to the holy grail of biodiversity. Many rare bird species are frequently to be found sheltering under its leafy expanse, including birds like the stone curlew (nowadays even rarer since it is too fond of laying its eggs in the cosy hollow of a tractor wheelway). Skylarks are also a regular visitor to tender young sugar beet plants as they like to peck the leaves for moisture. Anyone who thinks skylarks are in decline should listen to the dawn chorus in a Norfolk beet field in springtime. Game birds like pheasants and partridges too enjoy the shelter of the beet canopy – that is until they are flushed out by the beaters in November and blasted to smithereens! More recently the pink-footed goose has taken to stopping off in droves for a winter break on the left over’s of the county’s favourite crop. The flocks seem particularly partial to the bits of root and leaves left behind by the harvester – maybe they have a sweet tooth too! The beet aftermath acts as a helpful diversion from the farmer’s freshly sown and vulnerable winter cereals. Numbers have increased steadily over recent years with local watchers now reporting in excess of 100,000 birds on fields around the North Norfolk coast during the winter months (that’s about 50% of the world’s population, incidentally). One in six bags of sugar consumed in this country is produced in Norfolk and the industry helps maintain the livelihoods of 2,500 local farmers as well as another 7,000 co-workers in the growing, processing and transport sectors. It is currently fashionable to elevate the status of cane sugar above home-grown beet, as if somehow being more environmentally-friendly and supporting of third-world producers. In reality most of the world’s cane sugar is produced on a vast scale of monoculture which supports no more biodiversity than cane toads and snakes. Britain, however, is in an enviable moral position compared to our EU partners as we already import almost half our needs from third world countries, maintaining the economies of countries like Mauritius, Fiji and Jamaica. With the critics of unhealthy foods currently enjoying ‘open season’, the health lobby is having a pop at sugar in general and anything containing sugar is considered fair game for reproach. It is worth remembering that compared to fat, sugar has just a fraction of the calories (about 20 per teaspoon) and the ‘brown bread vs. white bread’ argument is fictitious for sugar, as the only thing raw sugar has in it that refined white sugar does not is molasses – and we all know what happens if you eat too much of that! All things considered, whether we view it as an accident of history or a happy consequence of war-time strife, the beet sugar industry in Britain generally - and Norfolk in particular - has a lot to crow about. Think about that next time you lift a bag off the supermarket shelf!
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 20:00:24 +0000
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