I can't eat it all!

Sophie was delighted when we went out today to find the sugar beet harvested - no need for her to pull one up, just pick one off the pile.
The campaign started last Friday - which means the factory is up and running. It will work 24/7 until all is processed (usually until early February). The growers are told when they have to take their beet in - the factory could not store it all at once. This lot will be going quite soon - it is not stored like this for the long term. If the farmer is given a date after Christmas to take his crop in he has to decide whether to leave it in the ground, and run the risk of a hard cold winter resulting in frozen ground so he can't get it out, or harvesting it while the ground is still soft (but not too soft or the beet has mud stuck to it). In this case they build a wall of straw bales about 10ft high round the 'beet ramp', which is a large concrete pad at the edge of the field, to form a 'box' which they fill with the beet and put bales on top to protect it from the frost - frozen beet has a lower sugar content so they get less money for it. Motorists often curse the beet - the trailers travel slowly, they drop mud on the road which splashes up all over the cars when it's wet - but it is a crop almost exclusively grown in East Anglia and is important for the local economy. Nothing is wasted, the spent pulp is used for animal feed, the heat produced in the processing is used for heating greenhouses etc and the leaves left on the fields are ploughed back in as a natural fertiliser.