Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) – The hot and dry summer has also led to losses in the sugar beet harvest. Farmers in North Rhine-Westphalia harvested 4.33 million tonnes of sugar beets this year, 7 percent less than in 2021, as the State Statistical Office IT.NRW announced on Wednesday in Düsseldorf. The acreage remained roughly the same at 54,200 hectares.
However, this year’s harvest was not extremely meager, as a look back shows: over the past ten years, the amount of beet in NRW was six times lower than in 2022. The lowest value in this period was 2016 with 3.63 million.
A positive for the farmers this year was that the weather in autumn improved for plant growth and the beets got a high sugar content. As a result, the effects of the summer drought were “largely compensated”, according to the state statistics office.